Betas! How can we help you find them? Especially for newbies? (also: tags)

[littlebutfierce]

The tiny thing in this post first: I've been messing around w/the tags, in an effort to make them nested & neat, & much easier to browse if you want WIP challenge stuff that isn't a check-in post, or info on writing sessions in your time zone, etc. I think there's a bug that still needs tweaking, but we'll see what Support says. BTW, if any of you have been interested in nested tags but couldn't find the info on how to use them, my support request has some useful explanations!

On to betas! There's been consistent interest in finding betas through the comm. How can we make this happen for you? I thought maybe a list of people volunteering to beta might be helpful, but I know that such lists go out of date almost immediately. There's even beta_masterlist, but that doesn't seem to be active either.

Looking at the other side of the equation, if you need a beta, feel free to post & ask! If we get to the point where we have a dozen beta-seeking posts a day, we'll have to rethink that, but for now it's absolutely fine.

But I'm still really stuck on wanting a way to keep a list of volunteer betas. Is there anyone else who would find this useful? I ask partly because of this comm's original focus on fic-writing newbies, & my experience as a newbie myself (which wasn't so long ago...). I was terrified of posting fic, & especially putting my username to it--this is why my AO3 name is different!--& certainly at first, I was too afraid to ask anyone I knew for a beta. None of my friends were in the fandom, & well, yes, I could've posted to the fandom's LJ comm. But it has over a thousand members. Way too intimidating for me at the time. Eventually I got my nerve up to ask a friend of mine to beta for me, & things got better from there.

But still, I agonized so much over daring to ask for a beta! I can't be the only person who went through that. Of course, even if we had a volunteer beta list, people would still have to approach a beta directly, but I think it would've felt less intimidating to me.

Also, I like betaing, & (time/energy permitting, fandoms matching if need be) would be happy to do more of it. It'd be nice to find a way to note that to people in this comm.

Any ideas on how to do this & keep it relevant & up-to-date without being too burdensome? Maybe it's impossible, but thoughts welcome!

Comments

[kate]

I was once told by the amazing fiercelydreamed that the way she got a beta was by going to someone whose work she absolutely loved (I think it was a LOTRIPS or SGA BNF) and asking who their beta was, and if they might help her out in finding a beta herself. The BNF offered!

It's ballsy, yeah, but it's exactly what I did to get fiercelydreamed to beta for me, so I can tell you that it totally works.

I beta now and again; it's taxing because I take a lot of time on betas. If someone is a newbie, I put even more time into their first beta (or two or three, if there's more than one), so I'm leery to beta for people I don't know, unless I know I'm going to have a lot of free time. I tend to write word for word, so if you send me a 2000 word piece, I'll send you about 2000 words of beta back. (This holds true even at 30k - I did a beta for auburn that was that size, and lo and behold, I wrote about 30k of beta notes.)

I try to be available and beta for friends because I have a hard time getting betas too. I've not found that one amazing person who betas all my fics because we just click (I'm always jealous of people like that), but I do have a stable of betas, and if I post to my flist asking for one, I almost always can find someone. I highly recommend this tactic. Make a filter, if there's a smaller group of people you want to beta (some people are very nice cheerleaders but not great betas - it's important to recognize that before you post, or you'll end up with mistakes they've missed because they're too soft-hearted to tell you).

I also recommend cultivating writerly friends (this will help with posting to the flist for betas). Once I came over to DW, I friended a lot of fannish people whose work I loved over on LJ. It turns out we've become quite friendly, so that helps when I'm asking for betas (and I've done beta work for some of my very favorite fannish writers).

I still have a hard time finding betas from time to time, but these tactics have helped me immensely.

[littlebutfierce]

Thank you for this thoughtful comment--apols that it's taken so long to reply!

Are you mostly in big fandoms? I can see these tactics working really well especially for those. I don't know how well it would pan out for me w/a lot of my fandoms that are teeny-tiny--I do have some friends who are kind & will beta for things they don't know the fandom for, but sometimes you really do want a fandom-specific beta. I'm kind of cautious in adding people to my circle solely/mostly based on common fandoms (I can be kind of cautious adding people to my circle in general, though) &... I dunno. It would feel kind of... ulterior motive-ish to me to do it in hopes of finding a beta? Which is totally my issue to deal w/, I recognize. Heh. Plus w/the tiny fandoms sometimes they just aren't there to be added.

I'm impressed by people who are fearless about asking for betas (whether in general--to their whole circle etc.--or by asking people specifically about betas, like you mention in your first paragraph). I do need to cultivate this mentality!

[curuchamion]

I'm on the other side of things, usually - a beta reader who'd like to do more work but seldom gets asked. (Okay, that's partly because some RL issues last year caused me to quit beta-ing entirely for a while, and I've not managed to pick it back up yet.) And when I do need a beta myself, it's always fandom-specific, so I'm always hunting for new ones. (I'm a bit of a fandom-hopper, yeah.)

Sadly, I have no ideas on how to keep a comm-wide list of volunteer betas up to date...

[littlebutfierce]

Oh, I hear you on the fandom-hopping & thus needing new betas. If only my friends would let me drag them into new fandoms w/me, I'd have less of a problem, maybe. ;)

I like beta-ing too!