12 Aug
12Aug

To anyone outside the querying community, hearing how rare it is to receive personalized feedback would feel wild. But, that's the world we live in now. I recently got two personalized rejections with directly opposing feedback and I want to share what you can learn from that situation.


In my specific situation, one agent told me my opening chapters were fantastic and paced well, they just didn't have room in their list to represent my genre presently. The second told me the opening chapters moved too slowly.


My first inclination when receiving the second rejection was to jump into revising my pages immediately to up the pace. But, that would've been a mistake. The key here is remembering how subjective this all is. Everyone has different tastes! Obviously if you get multiple people telling you the same thing, you should look into it. But! You can't please everyone. If you try to, you're going to end up with a bland manuscript without any sense of voice.


Remember to stay true to your concept for the work. Be open to advice that makes sense (I've found that when my knee jerk reaction is defensiveness, it's usually because I already know there's an issue but haven't figured out how to fix it yet), but also know your story well enough to know which advice to reject.

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