Chapter Trading Post

A while ago I wrote a post on Reddit suggesting authors trading chapters as a way of helping out each other in a manageable way, as authors might have time to read a chapter of someone else’s work when they didn’t have time to do that for a whole book. Also thought it might help with the whole scamming Beta Readers situation or those who struggled to get a volunteer Beta Reader for whatever reason. After all, you could get a whole lot of people to read one chapter each and get half your book covered, and the benefit of feedback from multiple people. I also suggested that you could do this with problematic chapters, the extra feedback making it possible to fix them.

The idea was shot down because that’s what writing groups are for. I removed the post despite only this single comment, not wanting to risk a load of downvotes while I was offline, but I later regretting it. 

For one, writing groups often require commitment and meeting up, I later discovered. Many are on Discord, which to me sounds like a total nightmare. In other words, writing groups may be completely out of the question for many writers. 

Then I learned that if you want to traditionally publish your work you can’t post any of it on public forums, including Reddit (yes, links too). I nearly had a heart attack! I had been very close to doing this without realising. The irony was it was the moderation on the post that was asking for a link that gave the warning. I hadn’t actually put the link into the post because it didn’t feel right before I read the warning, and I wanted individual contact, preferably via email, rather than through Reddit. The commenter on my post clearly hadn’t known this. I was thinking private messaging or emails, not posting chapter parts on subreddits to get feedback from whoever happened to read that. 

The comment could have easily caused some other ignorant person to do that because they didn’t know that was what writing groups did and go and post, destroying their ability to get their work traditionally published no matter how good it was. It wouldn’t have been so different to how I discovered there were Beta Reader subreddits, and nearly did exactly that.