Every work needs a third eye. 

The writer always misses errors. The human brain plays weird tricks on us at times, and one of the tricks it plays is to read something we wrote as we intended to write it - not as it is actually written. You can look at a misspelled word a dozen times, stare at it for ages, and it will persist in appearing to be spelled correctly. You see the letters that should make up the word in precisely the order they should be arranged, despite the error being one that would jump off the page when readers read. So…

Unable to justify the huge cost of professional editing (and not confident of finding an editor I could be confident would perform anyway, as there are editors and editors!) I initially posted on author forums asking for beta readers. Being an avid reader who beta reads and reviews free of charge, I was shocked at the quotes I received for doing a task I thought all readers were happy to perform free. Of course, as with editors, there are beta readers and beta readers. Some do a very thorough job and probably merit payment. Others do virtually nothing other than scan the work and declare whether they liked it or not.

Eventually, one beta reader (who normally charges, apparently) offered to read. However, she neither performed nor advised that she had changed her mind. Another offered a swap read, so I read his story about an African adventure and offered comments. And he read what was titled, at the time, The Inheritance and provided minimal moderately helpful suggestions for improvement.

Meanwhile, my very good friend, Tina Woehle, had read the very first draft and, far from just beta reading, actually did a moderately good job of editing. Her corrections of grammar etc. were were invaluable, but what was even better was that she, being a psychologist, was able to offer advice on characterisation and character behaviours that were or were not consistent with the personality disordered characters I had created or the reactions of those their behaviour impacted. 

After I had made extensive changes, Tina offered to read the work yet again. Yet again, she provided a wealth of helpful advice and suggestions. Just brilliant!  How lucky am I to have such a generous and talented friend? Without her, I’m not sure I would ever have felt confident to complete and publish this work. But… here we are, just one month later, and it’s been submitted for publication and a launch date set.
Thank you, Tina, for being the very best third eye I could have wished for.