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Hey! Welcome back!

You might not like this answer, but I’d say it’s whatever works best for your story. With some series, it’s definitely better to edit the first book first. I have a duology I’ll almost certainly refine book 1 in before I write book 2, or at least before I expect book 2 to offer a solid foundation to work from. Meanwhile, my plan for the duology I’m working on right now is to write both books and then edit them as a whole

For me, the difference shows up in how the stories fit together; is the series one pretty continuous story, or are there clear breaks in the arcs? (Obviously there’s likely to be some of both, but I find that some series are almost more like connected standalones than a single story in parts, if that makes sense.) For the duology that’s more two separate stories, I’ll write and edit them separately; for the duology that’s more like one story in two parts, I intend to approach it as one piece.

Hopefully that made sense. If not, I can expand or reword as needed.

M’kay, so there are beta-readers and there are alpha-readers. Alpha-readers read your book as you’re writing it and provide some general feedback as well as a lot of encouragement and general reader reactions; for me, they’re primarily a source of accountability with the secondary task of letting me know what I might want to edit first when the time comes.

Beta-readers read a (generally much) later draft. They’re there to give you feedback on things you might have missed in your self-edits and let you know what the general reader response is to this close-to-final version. They’ll let you know whether or not your story beats, characters, world, etc. are all giving the intended impression and conveying the story you’re trying to tell.

You can employ beta-readers just once or you can have multiple rounds of beta-readers for different points of the process. I generally get beta-readers between my personal edits and professional edits, but you could have a round after professional developmental and/or line edits, you could have a round after just a couple drafts if you want to double-check that your self-edits are taking you in the right direction, whatever. Obviously there will be at least one round of self-edits between beta-readers and whatever comes after that stage, since you’ll need to apply the feedback that furthers your story and you might also want to go over a draft after you’ve implemented all of that to see where your story is at afterward.

I actually have a full blog post going into beta-readers, alpha-readers, sensitivity readers, and what is the role of each, if you want to take a look at that.

Again, let me know if any of that was unclear or if there’s anything you’d like me to expand on! 🙂