About First Look Readers

Authors often struggle to find honest, unbiased feedback on the manuscripts they are developing that get submitted to a publisher. Friends and family are great, but they are hardly unbiased!

FLR was formed to create a large, diverse community of readers from every genre to read an author’s manuscript (often after a first round of editing) and provide in-depth feedback to improve the book.

In addition, authors and their editors value quick feedback on which title options to choose, which book cover designs to go with, and even how brief book descriptions are worded. By providing this service to authors and their publishers, our community hopes to improve the chances that authors have to publish breakthrough books!

If you are selected to review a manuscript and return your quality feedback within the deadline, you will automatically earn a gift card—usually $25 or sometimes more for urgent projects.

When you take a brief title, cover, interest, or other survey (under 5 minutes to complete), you are entered into a gift card sweepstakes. The sweepstakes participants are only those First Look Readers who have also taken that same survey, so your odds of winning for each survey you take are usually between 2% to 5%. 

Never! All First Look Reader community member data is kept secure and private. Neither publishers nor any other third party has access to your personal data such as contact information, reading preferences, or any other personal characteristics.

The sponsor company of First Look Readers is Target Audience Insights, a market research firm for authors, editors and publishers to help them secure and apply their insight and research efforts. TAI’s team develops the surveys and analyzes the results once First Look Readers share their feedback to ensure that authors receive a high quality, easy-to-understand report for their book editing and marketing efforts.