What Are Beta Readers, and Should You Use Them? – by Melissa Donovan…
on Writing Forward:
By the time you’ve finished your manuscript and are ready to show it to agents and editors — or self-publish and put it in front of readers — you have almost certainly lost the ability to view your own work with a critical eye. While there are some tactics you can use to self-edit, you are probably too close to your manuscript to examine it objectively and see all of its weaknesses and flaws. And if you can’t see the weaknesses and flaws, you can’t fix them.
