Do you need the opinion of someone who isn’t your mom? (We love you, Mom.) We’ve got you covered. Choose from our wide range of readers and get a feel for how audiences will like your book!
This is a great edit to purchase for testing out your market. Did you hit the expected tropes? Are your characters reading right? Just ask our beta readers.
Beta reader edits include a full page of reader responses and thoughts. In-line edits can be purchased as an add-on.
If you have questions about our process or one of our editors, please email us at hello@saltandsagebooks.com!
Meet our Beta Readers
Cameron Van Sant
Cameron Van Sant is an editor who wants to see every writer succeed. He has experience editing creative works, professional reports, and academic writing.
Larissa Pienkowski
Larissa Melo Pienkowski is a freelance editor and sensitivity reader, as well as the assistant publisher of Dottir Press. She holds a Bachelor’s in Social Work from Simmons University and a Master’s in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. As the queer daughter of Brazilian and Polish immigrants,
Taye Timko
Taye Timko is a Jack and Jill of all Trades and the Master of Some—primarily an educator of color at an African centered high school on the East Coast, teaching (sometimes) reluctant young writers by day and is a writer and freelance editor by night.
Catherine Liao
Catherine is a historical and literary fiction writer who has been lost in books since they could hold them. Aside from writing, they’re also working towards a degree in archaeology. You could say they’re always looking to dig up the next great find—in both books and their career.
Lynn Brown
Lynn Brown wrote her first book at the age of 6, (a fantasy!) to the wild acclaim of her kindergarten class. She’s been helping other writers get their words out into the world ever since.
Akelah Adams
Akelah has an English degree and she would love to put it to use helping you write your story!
Candice Roma
Candice has dedicated her life to words. Initially she had dreams of going to medical school, but when she was faced with the choice of Inorganic Chemistry or taking a Creative Writing class, she ran screaming from the science lab and into the amazing world of creative fiction.
Neha Patel
Neha is an Indian American whose first love was stories. She loves playing around with words to weave engaging sentences that tell meaningful tales. As an editor, she insists on using Oxford commas but will allow sentences to end with prepositions. Her favorite genres are nonfiction and fantasy, which is ironic because they’re literally on the opposite ends of the literary spectrum, but she loves having the best of both worlds.
Trisha Tobias
Trisha Tobias is an associate developmental editor at book packager Dovetail Fiction. She was also an associate fiction editor for FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology, a 2018 Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, and a 2019-2020 Highlights Foundation Diversity Fellow.
Kim VanderHorst
Kim is an experienced and kind developmental editor—maybe because she’s a mom, or maybe because she’s Canadian. But she has a knack
Heidi Robbins
Heidi Robbins has a Masters in Education with an emphasis in library media, with additional degrees in Theater and Speech Education with a minor in English!
Mya Alexice
Mya is a poet, writer, and reader with a neverending TBR pile and a cat named Ramen.
Madison Parrotta
From an early age, Madison Parrotta was paranoid that she’d never be able to read. When she was proven wrong, she devoured as many books as she could. As Madison grew older and continued to read, she noticed the lack of people like herself (i.e. that were disabled). At this point, she knew she wanted to work with books that were written by disabled writers or were about disability in a way that dismantled ableism.
Lee Anne Cooksey
Lee Anne Cooksey has worked for a local government agency for 30 years. She currently supervises four (4) team members who are responsible for procuring
Rachel Hansen
Rachel likes sweet regency romances, YA fantasy, YA fiction, dystopian, non-gruesome mystery, and middle grade of all genres.
Sara Olds
Writer, mother—grandmother now too!, teacher, traveler and equestrian—Sara believes in making the most of the great loves in her life.
Thais Carreira Afonso
Thais is a Brazilian WOC queer. Her degree in Media Studies has slowly grown useless, even though she literary Majored in how to be good at social media (but can’t understand it better than twelve-year-olds) and she currently lives with her parents, after a lengthy five-year stay in Shanghai her mother still refers to as her ‘foreign exchange.’
David Pena
Born and raised in Madrid, Spain, David is an editor and writer with a background in Psychology who loves books as much as he loves people. You can find him behind his laptop and second coffee or walking around his hometown buying more and more books, always ready to listen and trade stories.
Kimberlee McCoy
Kimberlee enjoys historical fiction, YA fiction, middle grade fiction, personal development and self-help, cookbooks, and memoirs.
Carrie Jacks
Carrie loves the entire process of publishing a novel—from developing that brand new, exciting idea to formatting the words to look perfect on the page.She is sometimes intimidated by editing her own words, but she loves to read other writers’ works in progress to help make them the best they can be.
Tova Seltzer
Tova Seltzer is a fiction writer, poet, and editor with a B.A. in creative writing from American University in Washington, D.C. The great love of her life is working with stories in development and figuring out what they want and need to be the greatest they can be. You can be confident she’ll take your fictional character children as seriously as you do!
Nicholas Dante di Angelo
A wild child of the chaotic arts, Nicholas Dante di Angelo is a creative soul with a proclivity for colorful, vivid imagery in his artwork and writing. He enjoys bold, brilliant splashes of color in everything and anything. When not nose-deep in a book, he can be found playing video games and writing critical analyses on the pop culture/media he consumes.
Trinica Sampson
Trinica Sampson is a writer and freelance editor with experience as an Editorial Assistant at Utne Reader and The Antioch Review. She loves working with writers to make their novel, comic, video game dialogue, poetry, or personal essay the best version of itself that it can be.
Ronkwahrhakónha "Lune" Dube
Lune’s professional résumé includes everything from neopagan witchcraft and wilderness survival; to trauma-informed care and mental health issues; to archery, atlatl, and sword-fighting, so naturally
Justin Ho
Justin Ho is a writer who grew up in Hawaii but spent most of his time in online worlds. Now a bit more grounded, he’s currently pursuing traditional publishing, keeping up with YA releases, and learning Korean (code for watching too much TOMORROW X TOGETHER and BTS content).
Jeigh Meredith
Jeigh likes all different genres of middle grade and young adult.
Erin Olds
Erin’s officially been writing for over half of her life, and has the stacks of scribbled-in notebooks to prove it! She can help you with anything from story structure to emotional payoffs.
Heba Elsherief
Heba Elsherief holds an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Language and Literacies from the University of Toronto. A former Islamic high school English teacher, she now teaches university classes in cultural studies and language education.
Rebecca Blevins
Rebecca Blevins is the author of four published books. She has been freelance editing for several years and enjoys helping
Savannah Tenderfoot
Savannah Tenderfoot is a seasonal park ranger who would always choose a day in the woods or at the beach over being indoors. When she isn’t reading, you can find her gardening, cooking, kayaking, beading, relaxing near the river with a book of brain-teasers… the list goes on.