3 Times You Ignore Reader Feedback at Your Peril

Before we curate an author's Spun Yarn Manuscript Report, we ask how far along they think they are in the editing process on a scale of 1 - 10. The average score over a hundred manuscripts? 7.3.

We also track every manuscript's scores from readers, who are comparing the manuscript they've just to other well-known books in the genre. The average overall score? 6 / 10.

There's a gap here. It's grayish, smudgy around the edges, and rrrrrreally annoying to authors.

After getting your beta reader feedback, how do you decide how much more work you really need to do? Do you really need to make the changes your readers suggest, or is the whole thing a matter of opinion? If writing and reading are subjective arts, why change the manuscript at all, especially when you've put more thought into this book than any other person on the planet?

Sometimes readers may be pointing to a valid issue, but may not have the right solution for it. Other times, readers are going to be spot on. Here are a few rules of thumb based on all the manuscript reports we've done.

1. When two or more readers independently agree on an issue, pay attention.

Hopefully, your beta readers haven't talked to one another and don't know each other at all. For example, here's a report in which two readers had the same comment at the exact same point in the manuscript:

Reader 1: "I'm struggling with the biological and scientific details that seem off the main topic.

Reader 2: "The content becomes very medically oriented in Chapter 6, and at times it's too dense to read."

As a writer, this kind of specific consensus is gold, and the change is also fairly straightforward. Go back to Chapter 6, and cut out some of the dense scientific details. Read it for tone, and make sure it's consistent with the rest of the book. These easy wins are why it's so important to have more than one beta reader read you book.

What if readers agree, but it's on a major issue that's going to require a lot of work?

For instance, what if you were writing a dystopian book about baseball, but your readers say it's actually a love story, and therefore your ending is all wrong?

This is the kind of feedback that takes some time to digest. Resist the urge to scoff. If your chest starts feeling tight just reading the feedback, it means you need to leave it on a shelf for a few days before you have the emotional energy to consider it. And then, when you're ready, you've got to consider it.

Go back to your story fundamentals and ask yourself: is this really a love story after all? Is there an arc you missed, or a reason why the arc you started out with became less compelling or relevant as the story went along?

The point here is that readers have pinpointed an issue that demands attention. They don't necessarily know the best way to address it. That's your job. But if you want a great book, you've got to pay attention when your readers agree.

2. If it's a straightforward minor change that doesn't matter too much to you, what do you have to lose?

In one of our recent manuscripts, one reader pointed out that the names of two main characters both started with a D and were sometimes hard to keep track of. Though as writers we tend to get attached to every word in our carefully wrought works of art, it can be helpful to think of editing as picking your battles. If a change is small, ask yourself what the manuscript stands to lose or gain by making the change.

3. Readers disagree on the problem, but all of them have some kind of problem with the same part of a manuscript.

At The Spun Yarn, we break a manuscript into four sections for feedback. This is another way of separating the opening, the building action, the climax, and the denouement. This is true of memoirs, and even to some extent of nonfiction manuscripts. When you have at least three readers commenting on each section, you'll begin to see trends. Particularly, you'll see that some sections have more reader comments than others.

For example, two readers think the ending was rushed, and one reader loved the action but didn't find the characters' actions consistent with their prior behavior. This is a cue that it might be in your best interest to take another look at your ending to see which issues you can address and which you'll need to leave as is. In your next revision, focus solely on what it’s delivering to readers, and how.

Even if you don't agree with readers or if they don't agree with one another, you have strong confirmation that you need to sit down with that section of the manuscript and give it a lot of thought and attention. Pretend you're a reader rather than an author, and try to diagnose the issue with fresh eyes. Just because readers don't always agree doesn't mean they aren't identifying an important trouble spot.

5 Things I've Learned From my Novel Feedback

When we started the Spun Yarn in 2017, I thought I knew a thing or two about what it meant to be a writer. I’d finished several novels over the years and also had a day job as a designer working with IDEO teams to use stories to communicate with our clients and customers. But once the Spun Yarn was up and running, I started to meet authors who had a completely different understanding of what it actually takes to write a novel. There were secrets to getting published that no one had told me about. It was like I’d just been petting the head of an elephant. I hadn’t realized that there were whole parts of the feedback and revision process that existed and that were SUPER important. The elephant’s feet. And his tail. And his back and his stomach and all of the rest of the parts of this giant beast of a process. 

“Once the Spun Yarn was up and running, I started to meet authors who had a completely different understanding of what it actually takes to write a novel.”

What I came to realize is that there are steps to eventually getting published that almost every book and every author needs to follow. If you follow these steps, it doesn’t mean your book will be published. But if you don’t follow these steps, there is a fantastic chance that it will never be published. There’s just too much of the elephant out there to ignore. I’m telling you, you’ll get trampled!

Here are five things I’ve learned about the feedback process from working with authors at the Spun Yarn.

First (and perhaps most obvious), you need to get feedback on your WHOLE manuscript.

Not just the first 100 pages, and not just a few random chapters. Having provided feedback to over 50 manuscripts at the Spun Yarn, one of the most commons problems we see with unpublished manuscripts relates to either uneven pacing or undeveloped characters. Both of these aspects of a novel are almost impossible to get effective feedback on if the reader hasn’t read the entire manuscript.

Second, you need to get feedback from someone who doesn’t like you.

Don’t get me wrong, they don’t need to actively dislike you. But they can’t be your friend or your partner or your mom. They should be a stranger and they should be responding to the words on the page, not what they know about you as a person. Just because a person is a stranger doesn’t mean they don’t care about your book. At the Spun Yarn, we’ve assembled a network of anonymous readers who are careful, diligent readers. They don’t know you, but they want to see your manuscript get better.

Third, it’s really important to get feedback from multiple people.

You probably have that one person in your network who is just fantastic. They read everything you send them and they always have thoughtful feedback. But the problem is that this is just one person’s opinion. If there’s one thing we’ve learned these past two years at the Spun Yarn, it’s that readers come in many shapes and sizes. And so do their opinions. It’s a huge thing to completely rewrite a character or an ending as part of a next draft. Which is why it’s so important to make sure that you have reader consensus on which parts of your WIP aren't working.

As a side note, this is also something we’ve seen when it comes to opinions from editors and agents. While these folks are professionals and super smart, it still often comes down to the opinion of a single person. Any good feedback approach should synthesize feedback from multiple readers (instead of just one) and distill reader consensus to make it clear what you should focus on in a next draft. Having learned that, we spend a lot of time at The Spun Yarn analyzing reader comments to find where readers are agreeing and disagreeing. 

Fourth, you need *actionable* feedback.

Writing a novel is hard work. It takes a long time. The act of finishing it, then starting from the beginning with the revision process, takes an emotional toll. Knowing where to start when you get started again can make all of the difference.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with your first edit. By focusing on some of the smaller, more obvious aspects of the manuscript that need fixing first (and I don’t mean typos or spelling errors), you’ll gain the momentum you need to tackle the bigger stuff. As part of a Spun Yarn Manuscript Report, we provide an author with a list of First Five revisions to focus on. It’s a great way to prioritize. And to get started.

Fifth, you need to thicken your skin.

Acknowledge that getting feedback is painful, but necessary. If your attitude when reading feedback is to look for reasons to ignore the criticisms, your manuscript won't get any better. You’re only human, after all. And that’s what makes you a fantastic writer. The Spun Yarn has made the feedback process as gentle as possible. Your feedback comes from anonymous strangers who care. They don’t know you. And you don’t know them, but they're not reviewers looking to pan you--they're honest, gentle people who want to see your book succeed. 

Your feedback is delivered only to you. We’ve removed all of the bullshit politics that often exist in writers groups or classes. Your feedback report is your feedback report. Take a peek at it. Then take a jog around the block. Then take a longer peek. Then really read it and get to work on your next revision. Getting feedback is never easy. But it could be easier. And that’s what we’ve tried to do at the Spun Yarn.

So get out there. And meet the whole elephant! Your manuscript will thank you. 

You wrote a book. Is it any good?

After months (or years) of carpal tunnel, crippling self-doubt, and procrastination, you have FINALLY FINISHED YOUR MANUSCRIPT. Congratulations!!! You emailed your mom and told your dentist and other random people on the street. Hopefully, you also sent your manuscript to a few readers, and at least one of them actually finished the thing and gave you some feedback.

So...what's next? Are you sitting on a bestseller? Are you ready to approach agents? How can you tell? At the Spun Yarn, we've learned a lot about what separates the finished from the not-quite-there-yet, and we'd love to share those learnings in our free quiz.

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