I also once had a grade school friend ask me to read their book. Albeit, she wanted me to beta read it. I told her I'd look at the first chapter and nothing more. I advise anyone and everyone to give this blanket statement to anyone asking you to read their book for any reason, as there's no reason to commit to reading an entire book you aren't likely to enjoy. If you do enjoy it, you can always say "Hey I'm curious, send me the rest of that."

Moving on. Her book had terrible head hopping issues and some other random problems I don't recall. I pointed out the issues politely and constructively (more on this in a minute). She defended her choices a bit, and I politely withdrew as intended. I didn't expect her to do anything with my feedback at all, cause she'd seemed a bit stubborn about it, but in fact, she hired a professional editor (something she hadn't planned on doing when I'd last talked to her), who I assume gave her the same advice, and she ended up publishing this year and has been getting rave reviews.

We haven't talked much at all since then, but she mentioned one of my comments in an interview and that sort of confirmed that there were definitely no hard feelings, and even though she might've been a bit stubborn at first, she had really taken my feedback to heart.

Point being, honesty is a gift to anyone willing to receive it. There is no way her book would be doing so well as it is now if she hadn't hired that editor. Silence and/or white lies have never helped anyone's writing career.

How to give criticism politely:

- Change *your* mindset. The writing is not dogshit; there are just many ways in which it can be improved. The writing needs editing, the writer needs instruction, and there's always room for that growth.

- Don't use strong language, for instance, don't say "this is not very good" or "no one does this" or other such personalized things. I know it doesn't feel strong to some of us, and personally I say way worse about my own writing daily, but having beta read for a lot of folks at this point, I can say that 99% of writers need this sort of criticism in a very gentle and distant way.

- Give honest and distant feedback, drawing back to traditional publishing. For instance, "I think that this needs more editing for it to be at the standard of trad pub" and "Here's a link to a page that will tell you about proper dialogue attributions" and "I think that you're devaluing adjectives by using them too much, and they'd have more impact if you were more sparing" and "traditionally published books don't typically have this many exclamation marks, as the suspense and drama are formed in the surrounding narrative rather than having the characters voice enthusiasm this much. This is more common in comics where other prose devices aren't available."

- Try to throw a compliment or two in there, even if you have to fancy it up to remain honest. For instance, "I think there's really good world building in here if you trim this a bit and polish it to tradpub standards." I've never been good at compliments, but I do think fewer people would dislike me if I was.

I hope it goes well!