Beta readers · Iris
Readers who tell you how the book actually reads.
Iris puts a panel of readers chosen for your book in front of your manuscript. They read it in order, without knowing what comes next, and tell you where they leaned in, where they drifted, and what they would say to a friend.
The town had not changed so much as settled, the way a face settles. The bakery was a phone shop now and the phone shop was already closing down. Someone had painted the shutters of the old cinema a hopeful yellow.
She walked down to the harbour. There were fewer boats than she remembered, and the blue one with the crooked mast was gone, and so was the trawler her uncle had painted the colour of a boiled sweet.
An old man was mending a net on the slip, and he lifted his head when her shadow reached him. “They say he is selling,” the old man said after a while. “Your brother.”
The shutters painted a hopeful yellow. I know exactly what kind of town this is now, and I already feel sorry for it.
Third paragraph of the walk to the harbour. I get it, the town is smaller. I started skimming for the uncle.
Nobody mends a net on the slip any more. If this is the present day, he is doing it to be seen doing it. Is that the point?
Wait, who sold the house? I thought her mother did, two pages ago. Now it sounds like the uncle.
What one reader would tell a friend“Give it until the brother shows up. The middle wanders, but the last three chapters made me go back and reread the first one.”
01
A panel picked for your book
Iris proposes four readers who would plausibly pick this book up, each with their own tastes and patience. You meet them first, and the read starts only when you say these are your readers.
02
Reactions, not corrections
They read forward chapter by chapter and react in the margin by name: loved this, feels slow, confusing, a thought. No rewrites and no workshop voice. Your text is never touched.
03
What they would tell a friend
At the end each reader gives a closing response in their own words, and Iris writes up the read: where the panel agreed, where it split, and where attention dropped.
One part of the house
It all works from the same manuscript, so nothing gets redone.
Common questions
Up to about 15,000 words through the short piece editor (essays, posts, short pieces). Full manuscripts up to about 150,000 words go through the manuscript pipeline, edited in one pass and returned as a marked-up doc.
No. We don't train on your manuscript, and you own everything you upload and publish. It's stored encrypted, in your account, seen only by you and by us when you ask for support. The models we use (Mercury and OpenAI) run under API terms that forbid training on your text. The only thing we learn from is which suggestions writers take or refuse (the way any editor learns the craft), and that signal never includes your words themselves. Want it all gone? Just email [email protected] or [email protected].
That's the one thing Fred is built not to do. It reads your rhythms and word choices and leaves them alone; a line edit shows you a possibility, never a rewrite, and you decide what gets in. You can feed it writing you admire, your own past work, a writer you're chasing, a page of style notes, and it'll hold to that. If it ever sands you down into generic prose, that's a bug, and we want to hear about it.