I dont know if you have addressed copyrights and when the rights revert ot the author, or copyright of characters?

For me there are a couple of totally topical topics.

I wrote a [redacted] (read as: first novel that is probably too awful to publish, and I'm aware that it probably needs to be consigned to the pile of 1 million bad words they say you need to get out of your system before you write anything good).
But I get that writing it is only 1/4 of the work, revising it is the other 3/4. (Cue joke about marketing and promotion being the other 90-95%)
So as a character building exercise (mine, not my protagonists), I see that there would be value in going through the revision process, even though it is likely to end up in my personal 'burn before reading' pile of shame and ignomy.

So, I put out some feelers for alpha readers. Now the advice I had gotten from pros was to not bother doing line edits and fixing typos for the alpha readers, because half your chapters will end up deleted outright or completely re-written anyway.

On the other hand, I was very lucky to get a professional writer to volunteer to be an alpha reader, and she said she did want the typos removed. Should I secretly bump her to beta reader status?

How do you go recruiting readers and at what stages do you bring them into the process? (NB: I apologise if this topic is too sensitive, I know you lost an alpha reader and incredibly close friend a couple of years ago).

What other nuggets of wisdom would you give new writers on that topic?

(Here's a crazy alternative; you used to interview other authors, why not interview your early access readers or other people involved in the process of producing a book?)

Also, just about everyone who volunteered to be an alpha reader is not in the target audience for that book's genre (oops), so I feel like I really need to drum up some different ones (or perhaps just write a book so awesome that it doesn't matter that they aren't the target audience they'll get sucked into it anyway (which strikes me as a kind of chicken and egg problem)). If you wrote a book for a totally different genre, would you go looking for different alpha or beta readers? (No offense intended to Shanna's Mum :D ) If so, what would you do?

There is a local literature prize that I was thinking of entering. I have a really good idea, the maximum number of words is 3k. I looked at some of the previous winners, and last year's one was written quite badly - or perhaps it was really well written in the style of imitating someone who doesn't know how to write? (Cue iterations of they know that you know) ... Anyway, what would you do differently if you were going to write a short piece of literature, as compared to a normal short story where you were just trying to tell a really interesting story?

(I was thinking of writing it in the style of the Epic of Gigamesh FWIW, feel free to tell me that's a bad idea and I should feel bad)

Also on writing, I notice that for cyberpunk some of the most genre defining works (e.g. Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Snowcrash) start out with this enormously powerful and evocative use of language that is almost but not quite poetry. For the sake of brevity, let's call it 'prosetry'. Fairly quickly they fall out of it, perhaps it was too hard to maintain, or perhaps it starts getting in the way of the reader (having done the job of seducing the reader into the story, it has done it's job and can retire to the villa to drink chai-lattes and chasing cabana boys). Would you care to speculate on how one might write prosetry? Do you think it would be easier to write it as poetry and then just add words to turn it into prose, or would you say that it was simply a process of refining that first couple of pages above and beyond the normal revision process? Or is there something obvious that I'm overlooking?