Metapost: Beta Readers Needed

Official announcement: I'm writing a book. Or, rather, I've written one, but it's not published yet because I'm going through a round of vigorous editing. To my eternal shame, it's not the best book in the world, but to my immense pleasure, I feel confident in saying that it's not the worst either. But I do want to get it to the "best I can make it" stage and what I need more than anything are some Beta Readers to tell me where they see holes so that I can fill them in and upload this baby to the online e-retailers. Thus I'm calling for volunteers, if there are any brave souls in the audience.

Beta Reader Event!

Start: October 15, 2011
End: October 30, 2011 (or later, if that's too soon. Let me know.)

I'm calling for 4-5 readers who will be willing to read a book that weighs in at ~60,000 words long. That's about 180 pages in Word, when you set everything to Calibri font size 10 with a page size of 5x7 inches. I'm hoping for a reading time of about 2 weeks, and there will be a questionnaire to fill out at the end if you're like me and enjoy "guided criticism". Or you can just write me and tell me what you think.

What I need is brutal and specific feedback of the lines of "I didn't like X, I would perhaps have preferred Y, for Z reasons." If you're afraid you can't provide that feedback candidly, I can set up an anonymous feedback system so I'll never know who said what, but really I'd prefer to just assure you that I'd like to hear about the warts now as opposed to after I publish and the reviews start coming in and it's too late to realistically change anything. I'm not going to stop liking anyone over this, and gods know you'll be doing me a huge favor by giving me feedback. *hugs*

What will you get for this prestigious Beta Reader gig? Unfortunately, not a lot: you'll get a free electronic review copy of the book, but since I intend to distribute the final book for free on the blog anyway, that won't be a huge dollar savings. But you will be mentioned by name in the Acknowledgments section at the back of the book that only 1% of readers actually read. And you'll have my undying gratitude, which could possibly translate into a signed electronic copy of the book, as soon as I figure out how to do that.

If you are willing to be an incredibly awesome and impossibly cool Beta Reader for me, please contact me by email with an address that I can reach you with, a name I can use in my acknowledgments section, and your preferred reading format -- epub, pdf, and Word are my poison of choice; mobi is something I'm going to have to work on eventually, but for the moment I'd probably provide a simple Calibre conversion and see how that goes.

But first! You'd probably like to know what the book is about. I would. Here's a Beta Cover and a Beta Write-Up superimposed over a pretend "Kindle Daily Deal" just to look super Beta Pretty. It's betalicious. (Click image to enlarge.)

Please feel free to use this thread as Beta Feedback on the cover and write-up. Much gratitude and thanks in advance to you all. :)