It's time to talk about alpha readers, and we start with a caveat from Howard: "I don't want to read your book." Let's face it, we here at Writing Excuses might be great alpha readers, but we're not YOUR alpha readers. We can't be your back-door to fame and fortune as a genre fiction writer. The good news? There are good alpha readers out there waiting for you. You just need to know how to find them.

We talk about conventions a bit, those places that are full of genre-fiction lovers who might be able to help. We talk about Brandon's writing group (his alpha readers) and how his agent and editor are actually beta readers. This contrast illustrates the sort of things you should be looking for in an alpha reader. We talk about Howard's alpha reader (Sandra) and how she has to look at a script with no pictures, no blocking, and no dialog tags and figure out whether or not it's going to work. This illustrates how she's a genius and Howard's just a hack.

Brandon and Dan also cover what they do not want in alpha readers -- poor delivery of criticism and proof-reading topping the list.

And then we finally get around to some tricks for building a solid stable of alpha readers. It's not something you're going to pull off overnight.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dragon Factory: The Joe Ledger Novels, Book 2 by Jonathan Mayberry, narrated by Ray Porter.

Writing Prompt: Any time you've caught cold you're actually being possessed. Gesundheit.

Loud Howard: brought to you by a too-close microphone. Jordo did his best to fix this in post, but we don't record on multiple channels so there's only so much that can be done on our budget.

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