I can recommend eroticanons - it's my main resource for this sort of thing. As the name suggests, they're mainly romance and erotica writers, but there are a number of people in the group doing other things (e.g. there's one person writing historical fantasy, a couple of SF writers, etc) as well as people like me who do romance as well as other genres. People do beta swaps and copy edit swaps and that kind of thing.
It's an invite-only group, i.e. you need to know someone, and instructions for joining are at the profile page of the comm - if you're interested, you'll need to send a message to the maintainer saying how you found out about it (just say you know me). There's an associated Google group that is where most of the actual discussion takes place.
I have found it a very friendly group and useful for all manner of talking about the publishing industry, self-publishing and the like.
It is very competitive and hard to get published the traditional way. Not saying you shouldn't do it, just ... well, back when I was taking creative writing classes, I once mentioned to my prof (a published author of several books, married to a commercially successful fantasy writer) that I was feeling discouraged because my novel kept getting rejected by agents. She asked me how many rejections I'd gotten. I said "Uh ... about 20?" She laughed and said, "Come talk to me at 100." I've seen advice to send them out in batches of 10 or 20 at a time. Even getting a personalized rejection instead of a form letter is a big deal. Which I'm saying not to be discouraging, actually the reverse - it doesn't mean there's anything at all that's wrong with your novel, or that it isn't good, just that success in this business is slow and hard.
I wrote my first novel at 17, published the first one at 37 (that was like #7 I'd written by that point), and am making a living from my writing now, but it took forever to get here.
(Going through periods of feeling like "I am DONE with this, I am terrible, I will never be a writer" ... also perfectly normal. I spent YEARS doing that.)
Anyway, all of THAT being said ... I'm just finishing up the final edits on a science fiction romance that I'm planning to put out (self-pub) in mid to late Feb., and I've been fishing for betas on the mailing list, so if you think you'd be able to do a week to 2 weeks' turnaround, I would be happy to do a beta swap with your novel as well, if you're interested! ♥
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It's an invite-only group, i.e. you need to know someone, and instructions for joining are at the profile page of the comm - if you're interested, you'll need to send a message to the maintainer saying how you found out about it (just say you know me). There's an associated Google group that is where most of the actual discussion takes place.
I have found it a very friendly group and useful for all manner of talking about the publishing industry, self-publishing and the like.
It is very competitive and hard to get published the traditional way. Not saying you shouldn't do it, just ... well, back when I was taking creative writing classes, I once mentioned to my prof (a published author of several books, married to a commercially successful fantasy writer) that I was feeling discouraged because my novel kept getting rejected by agents. She asked me how many rejections I'd gotten. I said "Uh ... about 20?" She laughed and said, "Come talk to me at 100." I've seen advice to send them out in batches of 10 or 20 at a time. Even getting a personalized rejection instead of a form letter is a big deal. Which I'm saying not to be discouraging, actually the reverse - it doesn't mean there's anything at all that's wrong with your novel, or that it isn't good, just that success in this business is slow and hard.
I wrote my first novel at 17, published the first one at 37 (that was like #7 I'd written by that point), and am making a living from my writing now, but it took forever to get here.
(Going through periods of feeling like "I am DONE with this, I am terrible, I will never be a writer" ... also perfectly normal. I spent YEARS doing that.)
Anyway, all of THAT being said ... I'm just finishing up the final edits on a science fiction romance that I'm planning to put out (self-pub) in mid to late Feb., and I've been fishing for betas on the mailing list, so if you think you'd be able to do a week to 2 weeks' turnaround, I would be happy to do a beta swap with your novel as well, if you're interested! ♥