Richard Eoin Nash

• red lemonade
| 
• austin kleon

Hi Richard,

Here in France we have CoCyclics (http://cocyclics.org) for 5 years now and it’s not exactly the same way it is working.

We do not think that any reader is able to comment on a book or that any author is able to receive the comments. Because this is tough for both the commenter and the writer.

So what we do is offer to writers the possibility to work with beta-readers on our forums first on extracts, synopsis and short stories. And when they have 2 or 3 months of good behavior with everybody, they can ask for becoming an official beta-reader.

Once officially on CoCyclics’ team, you can submit your novel and have a team of 4 to 6 people (sometimes more) which help your book to go through a cycle: a first reading to check that the story, the characters, and so on are consistent, then a second pass after the author corrected the content to make a sharp beta-reading of the style. Once a cycle is completed, we have partners to read the books. We send an e-mail and the writer can get demands from them in the day.

But CoCyclics frogs (their nickname) have to return the help by helping another person and this make everybody grow in their writing. This is a big difference also : beta-reading is a good way to improve the writing, and the exchange of help make our community very strong and we have a great emulation between members.

Red limonade is very interesting, but I have some questions, since I observed for a few years some of the difficulties our young writers must overcome:

- people can make sharp comments which are meaningful but will be rejected by the author and will make him feel like hell, so that’s why we select beta-readers. There is no point in loosing time or making suffer people with comments which are not understood. Our beta-readers must learn or know how to be a writer whisperer.

- it’s hard for young writers to learn how to deal with comments. Too many comments can really loose them. With our system, they learn to sort style and content comments, but even with their practice of beta-reading, it’s not something easy for all of them.

So, I wonder how you deal with that (and I apologize for my english, I typed this quickly )

However, this is a very good initiative.
Congrats’!

    – Syven (05/24 04:19 AM)