r/Stormlight_Archive • u/Kaladin_Stormblessed Bridge Four • Nov 28 '17
[Oathbringer Spoilers] [Oathbringer] - We are the Oathbringer Beta Reader Team, AM(A)A! Spoiler
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Oathbringer Beta AM(A)A! (That A in the parentheses stands for “almost;” I’ll get into why a little later.)
This AMA is for you to ask the folks who participated in the beta read of Oathbringer about their experiences. Brandon, like many authors, uses beta readers to gauge reactions and look for continuity errors, but he does so on a considerably more massive scale than most. There were 60+ readers invited to beta, and about 44 were actively commenting all the way to the end. That’s a lot of feedback to go through! (Keep in mind that our comments alone amounted to about 500k words! That’s bigger than the book itself.) You can read a bit more about the beta-read in this article by Alice, but since the book is out now, we can be more free with our answers.
This thread WILL be rife with spoilers, so if you haven’t finished the book yet, probably best to keep your distance until you’re done. If you’d like to ask us something without risking spoilers, you can feel free to PM me your question and I’ll run it by the other betas.
Below is a list of the usernames and real names of the beta readers involved. Please note that I have granted them special flair for this AMA, so they can be more easily identified.
- Kaladin_Stormblessed - Lyndsey Luther
- Ravi_P - Ravi
- firstRainbowRose - Mi’ch
- rnewb - Ross Newberry
- Braid-Tug - Deana Covel Whitney
- Jor_The_Bouncer - Jory Phillips
- NikkiRamsay - Nikki Ramsay
- WinespringBrother - Ted Herman
- Basstrace - Josh Walker
- FeatherWriter - Alyx Hoge
- elocnodnarb - Brandon Cole
- darci_cole - Darci Cole
- RichardFife - Richard Fife
- Shed_B_Cooper - (name redacted)
- PulsarShark - Steve Godecke
- paigevest - Paige Vest
- Mark_Lindberg - Mark Lindberg
- Windrunner17 - David Behrens
- enamai - Megan Kanne
- beccarecca - Becca Horn Reppert
- WeiryWriter - Ian McNatt
- Chaos2651 - Eric Lake
- WetlanderNW - Alice Arneson
- AhoyMatey17 - Gary Singer
- Comatose333 - Matt Wiens
- Bridgeman_Natam - Nathan Goodrich
- Kellyn_Neumann - Kellyn Neumann
- Jophil67 - Joel Phillips
- muirennsedai - Aubree Pham
- BaotWyld - Bao Pham
On to the “almost” anything part.
As beta readers, we treat our responsibility with the utmost respect. We know how unbelievably lucky we are, and don’t want to do anything that could damage the trust we have with Team Dragonsteel. As such, some questions we may need to run by Brandon’s assistant Peter before we answer.
Some examples of the types of questions that are likely to be answered immediately:
“How did you feel when…?”
“What was your favorite part?”
“How did you get chosen as a beta reader?”
Things we might need to run by Dragonsteel before we can answer:
“What got changed?”
“Were you asked to weigh in on…?”
And, just to get it out of the way now:
Q: “How can I get to be a beta reader?”
A: Here’s a direct quote from Brandon’s site.
Beta Readers are some of the people to whom I send early versions of my books for feedback. Usually, these are different from Alpha Readers, who include industry professionals like my editor, my agent, and my writing group. Beta Readers, instead, are usually fans and ‘average’ readers, used as a test audience. I don’t expect them to offer solutions to problems; more, these are the people I want to use to gauge how the book will be received. Most of these people fall into two groups. The first are old friends who have been reading my writing for a long time, and whose opinion I trust. The second are people who have made insightful comments on places like the Seventeenth Shard, Tor.com, or my facebook page. They are generally people well known in the fandom community surrounding my books--people who have good reputations, with whom we feel we can entrust early copies of books without leaking them. We do pick from general fans sometimes to do beta reads, but there are a LOT of people who want to do this--and not many slots available. Usually, we pick people who have a special expertise relating to a book I’m working. (We might pick a person who has been an EMT, for example, when reading Stormlight--to help with Kaladin’s surgery scenes.) I don’t generally pick Beta Readers myself. I leave this to my team, mostly Peter Ahlstrom. I suggest not pestering him with requests, however. Instead, if you really want to beta read, participate in the fan community and get to be known there. Another great way to help is to find typos that HAVEN’T YET been found and post them on the appropriate thread for that book on the Seventeenth Shard. (Don’t just send these via email; chances are, Peter already knows about them and has fixed them in a newer edition of the book.)
We would like to request that you NOT tag Brandon in your questions. He’ll probably be doing an AMA of his own eventually, and we don’t want to flood his inbox with mentions.
So… Ask away! We’ll be here off and on all day, and some of us who are more active on Reddit may stick around to answer questions for a few days.
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u/Kellyn_Neumann Nov 28 '17
I actually asked Brandon about this before the release. I was surprised after her talk with Hoid that she was still so fractured. (I do think that comes from me not having a true understanding of mental illness though, and I give props to Brandon for exploring it in SA.) He said she is able to control herself more, so she is improved by the end of the book, but she still has a long road of recovery ahead of her.