The First Test Reader of Infused

Laura, a long time friend of ours, moved to town a few days after I finished writing Infused. She had no idea that I had been writing a book, but once I told her, she gladly agreed to read it and give me feedback. However, she had given up reading the printed page, and wanted to be able to read it on her Nook.

I only had my novel in Word and Publisher formats, but some quick googling provided me with a program that could convert a PDF file to an ePub (which the Nook could read). I had Word export the story as a PDF and then used the converter to change it to an ePub file. Once I had that file, I sent it on to Laura.

After she had a chance to read Infused, Laura and I got together to discuss her thoughts on it. First off, she told me that she had reviewed many scientific papers for friends in the past and, since she always wanted to have something good to say, she would normally start off by commenting on how nice the document looked and how good the typing was. However, she was not able to tell me that since the process of converting to a PDF and then to an ePub file had not gone well, and many of the sentences ended up with line breaks in the middle of them for no reason. I later found a program that would let me visually edit ePub documents without having to have blind faith in a conversion tool, and it looks much better today.

After that was out of the way, she next asked me if I realized that a lot of people were not going to like Geoff. I told her that yes, I knew that some people would not like him – the story was not written with the main character being an epic hero that always did what was right, it was meant to be a realistic story about an unrealistic subject. We then talked about the story in depth for a few hours. In addition to her opinions on various parts of the story, she also gave me a few details such as specific hormones that I should name in one part of the story and the name of a really fast acting poison to have in another part.

Overall, she liked the story very much, and she found it very straight forward and easy to follow – except the last paragraph. The meaning of what Geoff says in that paragraph had not been as apparent as I had thought it would be, so I added in some additional text to clarify what was being said.

I appreciated all of Laura’s comments and suggestions; it was gratifying to have someone read my novel and to have put a great deal of thought into discussing it with me.