For my preferred genre of "useful" nonfiction, it's not enough for me to have happy readers; I need readers who will go out into the world and take successful action. If someone doesn't bother trying to actually use what they've read (or if they try it and it doesn't work for them), they my book is still in major trouble.

Of coursed, that sort of real-world behavior is invisible to me.

So what I do is this: whenever it seems like a Beta Reader has absolutely loved my book, I send a personal follow-up a week or two later, just saying something like:

• "Hey, it sounded like you were going to try using some of this stuff. Did you? If not, why not? If so, would you mind sharing how it went? If you're stuck on anything, I'd love to help if I can."

I sometimes hear back that it really did work as well as I had hoped. Great!

But more often, I discover that they get stuck on something that I didn't cover, or did a bad job explaining. But that's still good news, in a way, because now I can fix it. I then take a couple minutes to help them out directly, and also put the same clarification into my manuscript for future readers.