(#3) Getting feedback on the manuscript….Now What!?!

Ok, so I wrote something, and I carved it into the rough form that fits the norms for my genre. Time to have people give feedback.

Who to give me feedback, and how to give them a copy without worrying about people simply taking my “baby” and putting it on the nearest pirate web site.
As to the latter I prepared a slideshow which talks about securing a manuscript in the digital age. After all, I am one of those professional technical dweebs who live and breath that topic. So instead of giving you a doctoral dissertation on how to handle your electronic copy of your manuscript, I will refer you to this link:
Manuscript Security in the Digital Age
Well, that leaves the topic of who to share with and what to expect.
So in my case, I did have a built in audience (as do most of us) with family and friends. I found that to be useful for catching grammar lapses, but those are really the last things you need to worry about at this stage.
“What should I be worrying about,” you ask?
Well – let’s hope that the premise behind your story is good. For instance, if you are writing about the life of your uncle Frank who was a boring person and only your aunt Pearl and maybe a few select members of your family would enjoy it. There is little point in worrying about the fine details. Those people will forgive almost any egregious errors you make and nobody else will ever want to pick it up.
Let’s assume you are writing the next Harry Potter or Girl With a Dragon Tattoo (Try not to die during the writing). So your story is actually intended to be picked up and read by a wide audience.
What you want is someone to tell you where your story is unbearably boring or if there are parts that they enjoyed “less” than the rest.
I asked folks to give me free-form feedback on a chapter by chapter basis. That’s where I got comments back like “I simply loved your character Ohaobbok! He’s awesome” and “Ohaobbok must die! Please remove him from the story, he’s pointless.”
Even though I didn’t get those exact quotes, the contradictory feedback that I got from people forced me to take things with a grain of salt. In fact, I found lots of the verbal feedback somewhat dissatisfying at best.
It turns out that I’ve had the opportunity to talk to several published authors and many of them found the random verbal thoughts from family and friends largely underwhelming in their usefulness quotient.
Realizing that I wasn’t getting what I needed, I started to ask for number ranges as well as free form thoughts.
I typically asked folks to grade things on a chapter by chapter basis asking them to grade from 1-10 on the enjoyment and 1-10 on pacing (10 being best, couldn’t put it down, while 1 was the reader was tortured and barely survived reading through that chapter).
If you have enough people reading it and giving you feedback, the average number should help you understand the trends of your writing. If the average review of your sixth chapter was a 2.5, you know that chapter was a low point for the reader.
This type of feedback was useful because it gave me areas to focus on.
My next post will talk about trying to unravel the feedback and identifying how to “fix” things.
-Mike Rothman