Two friends want to read the next chapters of my novel and novella. I am working on (what I hope) is the last edit of my novel and will then have to spend many hours on the novella, improving it. Considering it takes so long to get feedback from people and two people seem really interested, should I just send them the work in progress anyway?
One of my beta readers said she would be very harsh with the red pen and started writing on my first few pages as soon as she started reading. When I got it back that was as much as she'd written because she'd got so into it she forgot to check for problems. Not useful, but very flattering.
I see no problem with opting to let (or ask) people you trust to read any work at any stage - just be sure that they know what they are looking at - and what feedback would be useful to you.
Do you want them to mark typos? punctuation? capitalisation? Do you want them to check continuity? Raise questions?
It is a lot easier for anyone who isn't familiar with a text to spot a lot of these things than for the author to spot them.
David
Two excellent friends (or saintly souls, whichever way you look at it) read my first draft before editing. It was really hard work for them but they were able to point me in the right direction on my first edits so it was really helpful.
I wouldn't let anyone read my first draft again because I'm one of those people who skips words when I'm hurriedly typing, confuses speech tags and only changes paragraph when I finally remember. Chapters, you can almost forget altogether and I don't think there is any need to inflict all that on anyone ever again.
I didn't give that first book to anyone until it was nearly finished. Again, the readers were able to point out what I should be paying attention to on my final edits so I found that really useful too. I think an outside perspective really helps refocus you, but also gave me an impression of how my first book leaves the reader. Important, in my case, given the sequels.