This also boosts the book’s value-per-page and keeps a reader reading.

Engagement and recommendability both rely on readers rapidly extracting significant value from the text.

While doing your beta reading, rewrites, and revisions, pay attention to the reader experience, which is defined as the pacing of value received over time spent.

by building something useful and then remaining attentive and available to your audience, you allow good things to happen to you.

People will only recommend your book if it has successfully touched their lives.

“not paying attention” or “feeling tired” when the problem is actually a failure of reader experience design.

Steven Pressfield, author of the The War of Art, says: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

It’s easy (and tempting) to respond with an eye-roll while thinking, “C’mon, pay better attention!” But that only serves to preserve the problem. Far better to think, “A-ha, my book has a weakness; let’s see if I can fix it so nobody else gets lost in the same way.”

The second comment shows that I’d found a tone and style that the reader loved. (In this particular case, it was a matter of shifting from saying “here are all the options” to “here’s what you should do.”)