Jennifer Bowen
What does a 34 year-old-woman do after she’s written a Young Adult novel? She has doubts.
That was the state I found myself in. I’m what we’d call ‘yold.’ That’s young and old, people. Young enough that I can still remember being seventeen as not some foreign state. But old enough that I worried my novel wouldn’t resonate with an audience half my age.
When I was thirteen I fell in love with David Lynch’s TV show Twin Peaks. My novel is inspired by Lynch’s dissection of small town weirdos, dead prom queens, and his realistic take on the supernatural. With the support of a writers group in New York City, I wrote in my typical mad-woman style, and churned out a wobbly, thriving, first draft at the end of the year.
But…what then?
My writers group consisted of people like myself in their 30’s and 40’s. But I kept wondering – what would a seventeen-year-old girl think?
The only solution for me was to ask some teenagers directly. The first time I tried this it didn’t go so well. I was trying to chase down teenage nieces/daughters/friends of friends, and a lot of them weren’t all that interested in reading. But even with the little feedback I got, I knew I needed to make some serious edits. The main one being all the adults who read my manuscript chose the ‘right’ guy out of the love triangle, but all the teenagers chose the ‘other’ one. That was a reality check. #yold
So I wrote and rewrote. A lot. And then I tested it a second time with teenagers a year later. By this point I discovered they were called beta readers – people who read your novel and give feedback before it’s published. I’d figured out how to attract serious beta readers, and by the end of it, I had a 35+ page report full of feedback from teenagers all across the US on what did and didn’t work in my manuscript. It tested much better the second go around. They answered big picture questions, from relating and loving my main character June, to reassuring me that my ending–since it’s a mystery novel–struck that balance between satisfying and piquing curiosity. They also offered such unique specifics, such as my ‘texting’ seemed realistic and my teenage sarcastic dialogue was believable.
The whole process was so wildly helpful, the first time with editing my manuscript, the second time as a marketing tool to prove the viability of the manuscript. As I turned to the oh-so-daunting task of trying to get published, I realized I had a powerful secret weapon with my positive test results. I’d done the field work. I knew my manuscript was grabbing teens. Wouldn’t this get an agent’s attention?
And with that, I turned an idea–doing beta reader editorial research–into a company: BookHive Corp. One day, when my manuscript gets bought or I decide to self-publish, I’ll be thrilled to work with an editor. That editor, I’m sure, will not be seventeen. So it’s nice that I’ve had ten real-life age appropriate consumers provide me with a backbone of knowledge that I can trust. This is what I want to provide to other novelists: a method of gauging whether their manuscript is solid and ready for public consumption.
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