Hey guys. Lately I’ve been trying out read for reads.
However, I feel I’ve been getting burned.
I will read the person’s entire book and they will only read a few of mine then ghost me.
Particularly, I read a person’s story. At the time it had 18 chapters. I finished them all. They only read the first two or three chapters of mine. I asked what was going on and they said they were busy with work and would get to it ASAP. I let them know it wasn’t a problem. Yet I see them updating their story and have yet to return to mine.
I don’t want to seem pushy and continually badger people to fulfil the agreement.
Also, though I made it clear mystery novels are top priority, I keep getting out of genre recs, which I worry about turning down. I don’t want to come off as unapproachable or abrasive.
Mirror the work they put in. I wouldn’t go all the way in terms of effort unless they show it. So do the first chapter if you need to go first and if the person does only one, then wait to see if they do more. If they don’t, then like don’t confront, drop it. If they come back to do it like 6 months later, you could restart the agreement or something like that.
I get this all the time, where I spend a lot of time reading someone else’s stuff only for them to half-ass mine. It helps to size up really quickly when someone’s trying to back out of their deal before you invest too much time.
That helped with the having a 3rd party where it was 2 chapters at a time and you were reporting to the 3rd party. It takes the pressure off of you.
But if it’s run on your own with someone, no mediator, do chapter for chapter R4R. That means you lose a chapter of reading to them, at worst. You can initiate, and if they don’t respond, they don’t get anything on the next chapter.
But if THEY initiate, they need to put the work in first. You don’t even do the 1st chapter if they don’t. The burden of debt is on the one asking the favor.
Another one is the quality of responses: they can read 19+ chapters and if they can’t give feedback, then you don’t have a R4R. You can have 2 people who are decent at the R4R stuff but don’t mesh well: they irritating each other. That type is better to cut off before making whatever you’re doing worse. Hell, I’m not always the best match, especially during the summer without the structure of school and this abysmal heat.
But the hardest thing to deal with is when you like a story, and you want to read it, but your personal interactions make it harder to get into. That’s part of the irk in someone who doesn’t respond back.