Alpha and Beta Readers: What are they and how do you Find Them?

John Donne’s words “No man is an island”… seem appropriate when I approach the question of alpha and beta readers. Once we create a world and give it form through words, we can get lost in how it looks to us. It can become our perfect palace and we do not consider if anyone else would want to live in it, let alone visit it. We then reach a point where we must accept that our creation might need an alpha and beta reader’s point of view.