I'm Looking for a Few Good Readers

As most of you know by now from my relentless cross-promotion, the word Mâvarin is the name of a fictional country in which my unpublished novels take place.  I've been working on them off and on for longer than some of you have been alive: roughly 30 years.

Heirs of Mâvarin is well and truly ready to go.  It's written, it's edited, and nothing more needs to be done to it, until and unless an editor from a major publishing company says, "if you fix this one section, we'll publish it," (for example), and I agree with the change.

Mages of Mâvarin is not ready to go. The manuscript, which has never been printed in its entirety, is over 1200 pages long. It has little holes of missing scenes marked up with short red notes to myself, and inconsistencies because of revisions that force changes in other chapters, or just because I don't remember every word of the current version at all times. I also have a notebook of handwritten notes and scenes, not all of which I've typed in yet.

The biggest problem is the length. I've little chance of selling Mages of Mâvarin in one volume, since I don't have a large following of readers who are certain to want my books no matter how long they are. I'm probably going to have to break one very long story--one month, three countries and a legendary island, two realities, half a dozen major plotlines, and over a hundred named characters--into two or three books, even though they really won't be self-contained novels.

In short, Mages of Mâvarin needs work, which I won't have time to really put in until I get this accounting degree finished off early next year. Even so, I'm not willing to let it languish entirely while I write journal entries and slog through my last half dozen courses at University of Phoenix. I need to be making progress on it, even if it's slow progress, a couple of hours a week.

And I need beta readers.

A beta reader is someone who will commit to reading the entire manuscript, probably more than once, and offer constructive suggestions. I need someone who will say, "Lord Shari suddenly becomes Lord Arlin for three pages in Chapter 23," or "The scene with Rani in the hotel room contradicts the scene on the island earlier in the chapter," or "You should probably cut this scene completely, and move this other one to Chapter Seven." That sort of thing. If it's more critical than that, I'll probably be crushed and depressed for days, but if the beta reader is right, and I know it, I'll make the changes and ultimately be grateful.

So.  Here's the sort of person I need to help me with this:

1. The beta reader should be an adult, although I may accept a very mature and talented person ages 16 to 20. I wasn't ready at that age to write the books, although I tried. The odds are against a teenager having the writing experience, critical skills and facility with language to really help me.

2. The beta reader needs to be a fan of the fantasy genre. My husband, a professional editor, hates fantasy, which makes it hard for him to give me valid criticism.  I need someone who's read Tolkien and Lewis and Rowling and probably a slew of other writers, and liked their work. Only someone familiar with the genre will know a trope or an archetype from a cliché, what's original and what's not, and whether it matters that it's not.

3. The beta reader needs to have an excellent grasp of grammar and punctuation.

4. The beta reader should ideally be a fiction writer, albeit not necessarily a published one.

5. The beta reader must have the time and interest to see this through and do the work: read every word and offer useful comments where warranted.

6. The beta reader must be a kind soul who knows how to critique the writing honestly and fairly without crushing me like a bug.

If you fit all those criteria and are interested in taking this on, please email me. I'll take no more than two or three readers. I'll settle for one really good one if necessary.

Thanks.

Karen