What is Virtual Beta Reader?
Virtual Beta Reader offers a reader’s opinion of your full story to writers of all experience levels.
Virtual Beta Reader allows you to see your story through the eyes of your reader, focusing on their reading experience, their emotions, and engagement throughout the story. It provides insights into the reader’s perception of your story and on how to market it to your audience.
Virtual Beta Reader is broken down into four categories:
- General Impressions: Helps you understand how your story lands overall—genre and audience fit, character presence, and the emotional journey your reader experiences chapter by chapter.
- Reading Experience: See which characters readers connect with (or don’t), what moments might grab them—or lose them—and where they might be tempted to put the book down.
- Reader Insights: Discover what stands out in your story, what feels fresh or cliché, and get suggestions for edits or ideas worth exploring further.
- Marketing Ideas: get helpful input on potential titles, comparable books, and character comps—perfect for when you're preparing to share your story with the world.
Check out this sample report from The Wizard of Oz to see how Virtual Beta Reader can help shape your manuscript.
How do I use the Virtual Beta Reader?
To use Virtual Beta Reader, you will need to purchase credits, which you can do here. Virtual Beta Reader uses the same credits as Manuscript Analysis.
Once you have credits in your account, follow the instructions in this article to run Virtual Beta Reader on your document.
Can I run Virtual Beta Reader on my whole manuscript?
Virtual Beta Reader has been designed to work with your whole manuscript. The longer your text, the more accurate your Virtual Beta Reader results will be.
We recommend writing at least 4,000 words, or to analyze several chapters at once, to ensure you get a meaningful amount of feedback on your writing.
The maximum number of words you can use Virtual Beta Reader for is 300,000 each time you run the report.
If your story is over 300,000 words, Virtual Beta Reader may still run on your text but it might not give optimal results.
What is the difference between Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader?
Our Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader all offer on-demand feedback for writers.
Chapter Critique has been designed to provide instant feedback on a short story or single chapter (up to 4,000 words), and Manuscript Analysis provides actionable analysis of characters, plot, and setting in entire manuscripts, considering the full context of your story. Whereas Virtual Beta Reader provides detailed insights on your entire story from a reader's perspective, including who might be the best audience for your book, and how to market it.
In this article, you will find a comparison between these three reports.
ProWritingAid is made by writers, for writers. That’s why we work wherever you do and follow industry-standard best practices to ensure your data is always protected.