Took me a bit to decide if this fit with the category, but it’s indirectly related and certainly out-there.
I offer beta-reading as one of my services, or I would have never seen this Buyer’s Request, and it’s possible that a factor in my being picked was because I also do music. I kind of wish I could ask the buyer now.
Either way, it seemed like a fairly ordinary beta BR:
I need someone who can beta read a mediaeval adventure-themed short story at ca. 4 500 words or 35 mins
Including an estimated read-time a unusual, but I thought that maybe this was a buyer who had actually done the research, which is always a good sign in a writer. Skipping ahead a bit, I was contacted and got the order, and when I went to download the required files…
It was an audio book.
I did ask if the Buyer had a typed version, to make it easier to follow along, though they were in the process of rewriting so it would have been near useless. I had to almost completely shift how I went about beta-reading an audio book, nearly on-the-fly, and had to come up with a new ‘mark-up’ method. It was a challenge, but a good challenge. And the short-story was pretty good too!
Although I wouldn’t be opposed to beta-reading more audiobooks, I do think the ‘script’ would need to be mandatory. So, yeah, not so much it’s own “crazy out-there genre”, but definitely a crossover.