Hi guys, I'm looking for beta readers for my historical romance novel, it's inspired by gothic classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein. It features themes of love, mental illness, and disability, and an intense, suspenseful plot. It's full of plot twists so I won't spoil much here.

Synopsis:

A young author named Francine is struggling to make a name for herself in 19th century Paris. Amid personal tragedies and financial hardships, she finally lands her first contract which brings her recognition and attention from Comte Le Grand, her favorite author. He offers her a lucrative deal, and she falls madly in love with her benefactor. However, her road to success gets unexpectedly bumpy when she makes a sobering discovery, and she suddenly has to fight not only for her career, but for her life. 

IMPORTANT: No AI was EVER used in the creation of this book and I'm looking for HUMAN feedback only. It's extremely important to me that AI doesn't touch my work in any way.

Seeking beta readers!

Blurb:

A marriage born of obedience. A love neither of them anticipated.

Quinn Calven has spent her life learning how to be what others need her to be. A tool for negotiation. A flawless wife. She’s a woman forged by deception. But behind the mask she presents to the world, she carries a grief she cannot escape and a secret she must keep hidden from the public eye.

Jack Drussario, a capo in one of the city’s most formidable mafia families, understands that loyalty is earned, power comes at a price, and certain duties cannot be refused. His arranged marriage to Quinn is meant to strengthen an alliance between rival families, but Jack never wanted a relationship built solely on obligation. He craves a wife, a partner, and a life together.

Quinn is beautiful, composed, and everything a mafia wife should be. But beneath the surface, she’s fighting a battle Jack never agreed to be part of.

As their marriage develops into something unexpected, Jack starts to see through the persona Quinn has meticulously created. He offers her the one thing she’s never even considered asking for: a place where she doesn’t have to prove her worth.

But passion can’t erase grief, and devotion can’t compel someone to embrace a life they’re not ready to save.

Reckless Absolution is a dark mafia romance about an arranged marriage, unpredictable love, addiction, loss, and the arduous road toward choosing to live.

Ask for a little taste if you think you’d be interested.

Content warnings:

Reckless Absolution explores mature themes that some readers might find distressing, including:

substance use and addiction

grief and loss

violence and murder

family control and coercion

drug and alcohol use

sexual content

\Further consideration may be necessary; please read with care.*

Feedback I am looking for…

*Feel free to answer as many of the questions below as you want and/or give additional feedback.

A)     Overall impression of the book

a.      Parts you loved

b.      Points you felt bored or considered putting the book down

c.      Moment or line that stuck with you after finishing the book

B)     Were you satisfied with the ending? Did it feel earned?

C)    Were the characters believable?

a.      Did you understand their motivations?

b.      Character development?

c.      And/or just a general impression/feeling of the characters (ex. Did they make you frustrated/did you have any strong emotions toward them?)

D)    Did you agree with the way Jack handled Quinn’s addiction?

a.      Follow-up question: Did it feel as though he supported her through her recovery?

E)      Was the attraction believable?

a.      Did the intimate scenes feel meaningful?

b.      At what point did you (if you did) stop seeing them as people fulfilling an arrangement and start seeing them as a genuine couple?

F)      Did the world-building feel complete?

a.      If not, where would you like to see improvement?

G)    Finally: pacing, prose, and clarity

a.      Did the characters have distinct voices?

b.      Was there anything you felt was unnecessarily repeated OR was under-explained?

Preferred timeline:

I’d like to hear something back within two weeks. But if you need more time, just let me know. 😊

Critique swap availability

I would totally be open to this!

Looking for beta readers.

Back of book blurb:

Lina Erin has horns, fangs, a tail, and a laugh much too loud for the temple that raised her.

In the little town of Emberfen, she’s a member of the Town Guard, a tavern bard, and big sister to the orphans she helps care for. She has a gift for music, a talent for trouble, and a stubborn habit of helping people—even when they make it difficult.

Then her adoptive father sends her to represent Emberfen at the king’s ball.

Lina expects an uncomfortable dress, suspicious nobles, and perhaps something interesting to eat.

She does not expect to die.

The ball ends in blood and fire. The king vanishes, and a strange blight spreads through the capital. Food rots. People turn on one another. Even the clerics’ healing magic falters.

But Lina’s songs still work.

To end the blight, she must pass through the Dead Forest and venture into a darkness no ordinary traveler can face.

She may not be able to save everyone. But walking away from someone in need has never come easily.

Lina’s not a quitter.

Hi everyone,

New here and to all this.

I'm autistic and a great fan of the subject I write about. I had an idea three years ago that just wouldn’t go away.

I'm looking for beta readers for the Prologue and first three chapters of my novel, The Humblest Things.

I'd be very grateful for any honest thoughts.

**Blurb*\*

Mars is dying. For a thousand years its people have survived inside sealed, perfectly clean domes, and now the air and water are running out. Sael, a young commander, is chosen to lead the first landing on a green, crowded world they call Thurra. The invasion will follow The War of the Worlds exactly, but this time the story is told from inside the machines. The Martians have planned for every weapon on Earth. They haven’t planned for the smallest things of all.

**Excerpt*\*

I am sounding the horn.

Two notes. Rising, falling. Rising, falling. They go out from beneath the hood of my machine and roll away across the roofs of the great settlement below, and come back to me off the walls of its empty streets, so that sometimes I think I hear them answered.

I am not answered.

The shared mind, which once held all of us together across the dark like a chain, is a great dim room, and every place where a mind once stood in it is empty. Ishen is not there. Arrak is not there. Ossa, Dor, Fenn, Tavir, Hesh. The young one whose name I cannot remember. The bud that lived four days and was not afraid.

I sound the horn again.

Below me, the city the bipeds built lies silent to the edge of the haze. There is not a light in it. There is not a sound in it but mine, and the flyers, and somewhere far off the barking of one of the guard-beasts. The red weed we sowed in its rivers has gone pale as old bone.

We came here to save our kind. We came across a gulf so wide that light itself needs minutes to cross it, in iron arks, sealed and sleeping, from a world that was dying to a world that was not. We had the fighting-machines, the Heat-Ray and the Black Smoke. We had the finest minds that Mars had ever budded. We had calculated everything.

In three days, this world was ours.

In three weeks, we were this.

**Questions for Readers - What I’d love to know*\*

Does the Martian voice work?

Did the Mars chapters hold your interest?

Was anything confusing if you don’t know The War of the Worlds?

Would you keep reading?

**Content Warnings*\*

 War violence, death, and scenes of captivity.

**Timeline*\*

Two to four weeks would be ideal, but I'm flexible.

If you're interested, please comment or message me and I'll send the chapters privately.

I prefer to keep communication in writing.

I’m sorry, I’m not able to do critique swaps at the moment.

Thank you.

I’ve never written a book before and have never had beta readers. But I had an idea about two years ago and I ran with it. I think it’s done, but it’s still kinda short so I’m not against adding to it.

I have no idea if it’s any good. I like the plot, but I’m worried that my amateur writing is, well, too amateur. If it sucks, then I’ll throw it into the abyss and never worry about it again. So be honest. I can take tough criticisms.

I’m open to trades, but I work crazy hours so I’ll have to stick to shorter stories if that’s all right.

Plot: Mabel Bloomfield is the granddaughter of the former Baron of Stratcliffe. The same Baron who hid his gambling debts and has left the family in supposed squalor. Now, with the pressure of her parents, she has to marry well to save her family.

August Harcourt is Mabel’s lifelong best friend. He has been fighting the war in France for the last few years. The only way they can keep in touch is through letters.

Will Mabel find love and protect her family? Or will August be able to return home in time to capture her heart before it’s too late?

Hello! I'm looking for a beta reader just to have an opinion cause I feel my writing as cringe or embarrassing since I started publishing them.

Synopsis: When pro hero Hizashi Yamada—known to the world as Present Mic—learns that his childhood best friend Oboro Shirakumo was murdered and his corpse was stolen to create the villain Kurogiri, something inside him shatters. Unable to grieve, unable to sleep, and unable to accept that his friend became nothing more than a tool for villains, Yamada begins a slow, horrifying descent into madness.

Warnings: Graphic Violence & Gore, Cannibalism, Mental Illness & Psychological Horror, Drug Use & Addiction, Panic Attacks & PTSD Symptoms, Suicidal ideation and attempt

And... I wrote this for fun at first, but I'm just adding more gore stuff...

If you're feeling like reading my fanfiction, please DM me! Ty!!!

Ever heard someone say, “Politicians have always been corrupt”? A Complete Accounting is my attempt to put that claim to the test, tracing 250 years of presidential scandals, political favors, cover-ups, and reforms. From George Washington to Donald Trump, it is written for curious readers rather than political experts or history buffs; it examines what actually happened without setting out to defend or condemn any particular party.

Every single President has their section, large or small, that covers the scandals that occurred in the executive branch under their presidency. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction and framework, 2-11 cover the 250 years from 1776 through 2026, and then a conclusion and short discussion at the end.

What I'm looking for in the next 2-4 weeks for sectional Beta Readers, and 3-6 weeks for anyone who would be genuinely interested in the full text to read:

• Engagement: Does the writing hold your attention, even if presidential history isn't normally your thing? Are there places where it drags?
• Credibility: Do the arguments and assessments seem fair, convincing, and supported by the evidence presented?
• Accuracy: Did you notice any factual mistakes, missing context, or questionable interpretations?
• Overall impression: Did anything surprise you or challenge something you previously believed? Would you want to keep reading?

Every version includes the complete Preface, introductory Chapter One, original chapter endnotes, and at least the opening four pages of the conclusion. Please note the endnotes makeup something like 20% of the page count, so they're a bit shorter than it would suggest. You can pick whichever era interests you; if you'd like two sections please let me know and I can send you two of them. Below this list is President Harding's General Assessment; each President gets one at the end of their administration.

1. The Founding & Jacksonian Era (1789–1837)

• Washington through Andrew Jackson
• Chapters 2–3 | 69 pages

2. Spoils, War & Reconstruction (1837–1885)

• Martin Van Buren through Chester A. Arthur
• Chapter 4 | 64 pages

3. Reform & the Age of Scandal (1885–1929)

• Grover Cleveland through Calvin Coolidge
• Chapters 5–6 | 86 pages

4. The Expanding Presidency (1929–1974)

• Herbert Hoover through Richard Nixon
• Chapters 7–8 | 76 pages

5. The Post-Watergate Presidency (1974–2025)

• Gerald Ford through Joe Biden, including Trump's first term
• Chapters 9–10 | 85 pages

6. The Contemporary Presidency (2017–2026)

• Trump → Biden → Trump
• Chapters 10–11 | 101 pages
• Includes the complete conclusion and its endnotes

7. Eight Presidential Case Studies (1789–2025)

• George Washington (1789–1797)
• Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877)
• Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909)
• Warren G. Harding (1921–1923)
• Richard Nixon (1969–1974)
• Barack Obama (2009–2017)
• Donald Trump (2017–2021)
• Joe Biden (2021–2025)
• 85 pages

Overall Assessment: Warren G. Harding. No evidence ties Harding directly to the bribes, kickbacks, or stolen public money that made his administration infamous. His responsibility lies somewhere else. He selected Fall, Forbes, and Daugherty largely through personal or political trust, defended Fall's oil-reserve policy without discovering the payments behind it, and acted against Forbes and Jess Smith only after serious warning signs finally reached him. Much of the evidence that would destroy their reputations emerged too late for Harding to face the full scandal himself, so it would be unfair to accuse him of knowingly tolerating everything investigators uncovered after his death. The harder verdict is that an administration containing Hughes, Mellon, and Hoover proves Harding could recognize ability when he looked for it. Around his friends, he too often stopped looking.

Hi! Seeking readers / swaps for my unfinished epistolary novel. My story may appeal to readers who enjoy the self-deprecating, literary voice of Emma M. Lion or the epistolary style of The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society. (May have butchered that title- one of my fave books but still don’t know the title)

Set in 2014, Ivy & Grace are bookish best friends who start emailing each other when Grace moves away for a new job. The story follows them as they share their lives, their joys and misfortunes, and what books they’re reading.

I‘d be potentially interested in doing a swap for manuscripts of similar lengths, or the first chapters of yours even if your book is longer. Send me a DM so we could see if we’re a good fit. I will say I don’t think I’m a good fit for anything with dark themes or heavy spice.

*Excerpt*

Dear Grace,

Right now, you are probably fast asleep, exhausted after a fulfilling night of saving lives at your new job.

And I? Well, my dearest friend is gone, and it will probably be months before I see you again; therefore, I have good reason to be completely miserable. 

I know what you’re thinking: when have I ever waited for a good reason to be miserable?

‘Tis true, ‘tis true, ‘tis pity and pity ‘tis true. However, I am turning over a new leaf, as soon as I’ve wallowed just a little bit in your absence.

I miss you!! and have barely gotten a chance to communicate this since we’ve been missing each other's calls all week! Darn night shift. Since I can’t talk to you right now, I must send this email and do it by proxy. 

So please tell me, because I’m dying for information: how’s Connecticut? How’s your job? And most importantly, how is Linus? 

I don’t have anything interesting to report. It rained all day; in fact, it’s been raining incessantly since you left, which has a bad effect on nannies and children alike. I entertained us all as best I could, but by midafternoon, they were at each other’s throats and I was at the end of my wits, so Eliza watched a movie while Charlie took a much needed nap… and I read my book and tried to recover my sanity. 

Xoxoxo, 

–Ivy

Ps. I’d appreciate it if you refrained from any comments on my sanity or lack thereof. 

Hey everyone! I've got a finished thriller and I'm looking for a few readers before I start querying.

Dana works niughts on a long-term care ward where nobody expects the patients to get better. That's what makes the deaths so easy to miss. When she notices a pattern no one else will take seriously, she starts digging on her own, and fast realizes whoever's responsible is someone she works with at every shift.

Mostly I want to know whether the twists land or whether you see them comung a mile off. Also tell me if Dana ever does something out of character or implausible.

Content Warning: death, medical settings, mild gore.

Open to swaps in thriller, mystery, or horror. Many thanks guys!

⚡ THE LIGHTNING STORM — A Prehistoric Sci-Fi Adventure

Book One: The Arrival of Two Sticks — 9,700 words

Book Two: The Journey — approx 36,500 words

Total: ~46,000 words — complete!

Genre: Prehistoric adventure with sci-fi elements — full of discovery, danger, and epic journeys.

I started writing this in March this year and finished it over about 8 months. It's been proofread and is ready to go!

I'm looking for up to 20 readers who'd be happy to read it and share their honest thoughts:

✅ Did the story keep you turning the pages?

✅ Was anything confusing or that didn't feel right?

✅ What was your favourite part?

No experience needed — just people who love a good adventure story! I can send it as a Word doc, PDF, or whatever format works best for you.

Please comment or send me a private message if interested. Thank you! 😊

* Grendrauden is a Providence known to hone its flora to supremacy. For every dew soaked blade of grass sprouts varieties of divine flowers amongst ravishing low hung leaves of Golden bark trees. Even the citizens show a true level of nobility. At least that’s what Shalidore thought before he arrived. What was he thinking? Paradise is only a fantasy to be chased by the most gullible fools and yet here he is. Drinking weak ale; kicking at a broom that pushes at his feet. Is that a rat resting in the hole in his shoe? Complaints have become a commonly wielded blade by Shalidore. So many analytics of the bad aspects of his life, but somehow it makes him feel better. Gives him justification to bed an even lower form of life than the drunkards, hollering at women, dressed in green and brown. CONTENT WARNING! (Drinking, self harm, imaginative fighting descriptions.)

* I’m just looking for a reader to rate my story or tell me its readability!

*I would be happy to swap manuscripts, and even leave notes on your stories if you’d like. I’m ready to get our stories to the next stage. Are you?

Please delete these instructions before posting.

Blurb:
Julia has built a life in Chicago that works—until several possible futures begin demanding an answer at the same time. A career opportunity could take her across the Atlantic. An adoption process is becoming increasingly real. And a relationship she never planned for is becoming harder to dismiss.

As Julia tries to decide what she actually wants, the voices around her become increasingly difficult to separate from her own. INFLUENCED is an upmarket psychological novel about desire, choice, intimacy, and the stories we tell ourselves when we believe we're making up our own minds.

What I’m looking for:
I’m primarily interested in your experience as a reader rather than line edits or proofreading: where you were engaged, bored, confused, surprised, emotionally invested, suspicious, or unable to put the book down. I’m especially interested in readers of psychological fiction/suspense and upmarket or literary-leaning contemporary fiction.

Timeline: About 4 weeks.

The manuscript is complete and approximately 88,500 words. I’ll provide a private PDF to selected beta readers and a short questionnaire to open only after finishing the novel. Please don’t redistribute the manuscript or use AI tools to summarize, analyze, or evaluate it.

If interested, please DM me with a little about what you normally enjoy reading and whether you’re available for a full-manuscript beta over the next four weeks.

Thank you!

Blurb

After two years cycling the Silk Road and walking a Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan, a first-generation American—raised between a mother who immigrated from Spain and a father who spent his youth drifting through the country—returns to America using forms of travel employed by immigrants and wanderers of the past. American Spirits follows that year of rediscovery across four journeys: a transatlantic sailing race, six Amtrak routes through the American interior, a hitchhike around Lake Superior, and the Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico. Told through the people met along the way, the book builds a portrait of a country whose truest self lives not in its places but in the spaces between them: in the sailor's cockpit, the overnight train car, the hitchhiker's cab, and the wilderness trail that goes on long after the people walking it have come and gone.

Content Warnings

Adult language, mild drug/alcohol use

Feedback I am looking for

The book weaves together three central threads: the direct experience of each of the four journeys, a portrait of modern America, and my own personal story. Because I write as a relatively quiet, observational narrator, my primary question for readers is: Do you want more of me on the page? 

Specific questions for the reader:

- Where do you wish for more of my personal story, thoughts, internal reflection, or emotional reaction? Where does the balance between observation and personal narrative feel right or off?

- Where does the narrative drag, drop in momentum, or lose your attention?

- What feels confusing, under-explained, or hard to visualize?

- Which places, encounters, or themes stay with you after reading?

Preferred Timeline

1 month (flexible up to 6-8 weeks). I prioritize a thorough, honest, and thoughtful read over speed. 

Critique Swap Availability

I'm open to swap manuscripts of similar length, across all genres, but I do prefer memoir, literary nonfiction, or character-driven fiction.

Taft, California. Friday, October 25, 1996. Homecoming.

Eight miles northeast of town, three hundred feet beneath the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve, the Navy has spent decades studying something it cannot explain and cannot turn off. At 3:04 that afternoon it wakes for the third time in three hours. By the time anyone thinks to check the wind, an invisible plume nobody authorized has been drifting toward ten thousand people for over an hour.

At 8:56 PM the stadium lights die mid-play. The sky to the northeast is glowing. Highway 119 is gone. Every Bakersfield station has gone dark, the phones are dead, and the government’s answer is a ten-mile lockdown and a story about a chemical release.

Only one signal is still on the air: a high school TV station, run by five seniors who were supposed to be covering a football game.

Over the next eleven hours they will do what no one else does. Go toward the light.

What they find there are neighbors walking into the glow and smiling, a strange light in the sky answering back, and a Navy captain who has known the truth for years and buried it. All of it leads to a question older than the town, the Navy, or the human race:

What if the oldest thing on Earth didn’t come from here? And what if we didn’t either?

Ark Meridian is a story about where we came from, told by the six kids who refused to let anyone bury it.

Google Docs (comment access) or PDF/DOCX, your choice. This is a working draft: 48 chapters plus prologue, ~157k words so far, with several chapters still to write and a hefty trimming pass ahead of me. I’m not after polish notes yet, just honest reader reactions to what’s on the page so far. Read as much or as little as holds your interest, and tell me where it stopped holding it. No hard deadline; a few weeks would be ideal. Happy to send just the first act (~45k) if you’d rather sample before committing.

Hi all. Any nonfiction beta readers here? I am looking for someone to read through a friend's leadership book. He's a musician turned business executive and the book shows how lessons in music can transform to the corporate world. (If you're a fan of 80s rock music in the U.S., this might be a fun read for you.)

Here's a breakdown:

What can a rock band teach you about leading a team? More than you might think.

Auditions are hiring. Rehearsals are preparation. Band chemistry is culture. A broken string is the unexpected problem everyone sees—and the moment your team discovers how you respond under pressure.

In The Leadership Set List: How Bands, Business, and Broken Strings Teach Us About Leadership, a guitarist and staffing executive connects lessons from the stage with the decisions managers face every day. Drawing on years of performing, hiring, building teams, and making mistakes, he offers an honest look at leadership as it happens: live, imperfect, and in front of people who are counting on you.

Inside, you’ll explore how to:

• Look beyond credentials when choosing people for your team
• Build trust through consistent actions
• Balance high standards with coaching and empathy
• Respond when a hire, a plan, or an entire team stops working
• Prepare people to perform without taking the spotlight yourself

With stories, practical takeaways, and a few hard-rock detours, this book offers leadership lessons from music that apply far beyond the staffing industry. It’s for managers across industries who want to lead with better judgment, stronger teams, and the ability to keep going when something breaks.

Hi all,

I have completed my first Science fiction book and am looking for feedback (I've already written several kids' books). Here is an overview of the book.

Commander Raan Lev-Serik is a hired gun for the intergalactic insurance company, IIC (Interstellar Insurance Company). In a fractured galaxy where insurance contracts are enforced with guns, and loyalty is just another clause, Commander Raan leads Team Kestrel on high-risk recovery

missions. What begins as a routine retrieval spirals into a moral reckoning when the team

uncovers the Codex—an ancient artifact capable of stabilizing or destroying entire worlds.

Caught between corporate directives, rival mercenary units, and survivors who have built fragile

lives around the Codex, Raan is forced to confront the cost of obedience, the weight of past

wars, and the people he cannot afford to lose. As betrayals surface and lines between right and

lawful collapse, every choice demands a price—sometimes paid in blood.

Blending hard science fiction with military action and emotional depth, this story explores power,

responsibility, and what remains of humanity when survival is written into a contract.

Thanks,
Dolev

Premise: Crystal Law already had a notorious reputation of being a goth biker girl, who smoked behind the school building, romancing new boyfriends all the time, and getting her nudes leaked by her first one.

And then she got arrested for Muder she didn't commit...

For months, Crystal was locked up in prison, as the prehistoric prosecutors and barristers argued over her guilt. Her false guilt was already published far and wide by the media, and her peers, her teachers, the townsfolk - even her own parents believed that she was guilty.

Crystal was eventually found not guilty, but she still left court with doubters, haters, protestors, and nightmares that haunt her sleep every night as the threat of her case being reopened wraps around her neck like a noose about to be tightened.

After just mere months after her release, the drama teacher's own daughter has been shot on stage while performing the school play, and Detective Inspector Willow, furious and humiliated from Crystal's relase, is dedicated to ensuring that her investigation results in Crystal being the culprit.

With the prospect of being arrested for a murder she didn't commit hanging over her head once again, it's up to her to bring the true culrprit to justice, before Inspector Willow gets enough evidence to arrest her once more.

Beta swapping: I'm more than open to beta swapping with fellow thriller writers and fellow YA writers. A sample chapter is avaliable upon DM request.