Beta Reader Group discussion

Before hiring someone, check their website and samples of their work. Some sell books on Amazon where you can read sample pages.

Who will you trust with your work and hard-earned cash?

I have no desire to embarrass anyone so I will simply say that I review websites and sample writing for paid betas and often find basic errors. Not picky stuff, but errors that cause confusion: dangling modifiers, missing words, awkward construction, and abuse of sentence fragments and comma splices.

These errors are covered in Strunk and White's Elements of Style in the basics section.

Check betas' work before hiring!

To add onto this, definitely do this before you agree to pay anyone to edit as well.

I have seen manuscripts that were supposedly edited professionally that made me wonder what country the editor was from, because it was clearly not an English speaking country.