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.

How To Decode Beta Reader Comments on Pacing

At The Spun Yarn, we do Feedback better than anyone else. You choose your reader demographics. We assign three readers to provide full novel feedback, including check-ins throughout the novel, overall comments, and qualitative scores compared to our growing manuscript database. Then we find consensus, analyze, and give you actionable suggestions for what to do in your next revision.

In our How to Decode series, we share our learnings from more than one hundred full beta reads from our diverse group of readers. How do beta reader comments map to potential problems in your manuscript, and what can you do to address them? 

Ok, so you finished a draft of your WIP (go you). You swallowed your imposter syndrome long enough to ask some people to read it, (phew!), and at least one of them finished it (you're rocking everyone's pants off). 

So...now what? Your reader(s) said some good things about your WIP, and maybe some not-so-amazing things too. You have a feeling that some of their comments are right, but you aren't sure if you agree with others. What do you tackle in your next revision?

More readers = consensus = gold 

Quick note: the more readers the better. The good thing about multiple readers is consensus: where they agree and disagree. Consensus is liquid gold for writers.

Personally, when it comes to big story issues, I trust an honest reader's gut reaction that something is wrong, and then decide whether it's important to fix it, or whether fixing it would break something else. When two or more readers independently agree that something is wrong, I bow to the throne of consensus and I FIX IT.

If you don't have multiple readers (get some, and uh, we do consensus analysis really well), you can still map specific comments to areas you may want to look at in a revision. 

Comments That Are Really About Pacing 

Pacing, the speed at which your story unfolds, gathers momentum, complicates itself, and resolves. Different genres have different paces, literary fiction moving more slowly than thrillers, for instance. What's important is that your pacing should be deliberate and consistent. 

A glacial pace could lose readers and sound your WIP's death knell, even in literary fiction. A frenetic pace will confuse readers and may eventually lose them, even in a thriller. You may keep readers a bit longer with a frenetic pace than with a glacial pace, but a confusing, hurried pace is worse because when you do finally lose your readers, they will be frustrated and ANGRY with you. Hell hath no fury like a disappointed reader, especially when it comes to Amazon reviews. 

Let's take a look at the kinds of quotes we see in Spun Yarn beta comments that relate to pacing. 

"At three-quarters of the way through, I was riveted." 

We've noticed that our most liked manuscripts share this trait: readers are at their peak of enjoyment three quarters of the way through.

This makes sense when you think about it: in the first quarter, you're setting out your premises, building your world, and introducing your conflict and characters. In the second quarter, your characters are journeying, complicating the conflict, reaching their lows or gaining tantalizing leads to their highs, and by the third quarter, all of your work should be paying off as the plot and character development fall into place and gain momentum.

By the three quarter point, you may have answered or resolved some initial conflicts, but readers are tuned in and leaning forward to see your grand finale. This is pacing at its finest: a beginning and middle that meticulously set all the pins in place, a third quarter and finale that knock them all down in surprising ways. It's a sign of a great outline, or, if you're a panster, that your revision thus far have paid off, pulling all of your disparate threads into place. 

"The book was a little slow for me at this part..." 

Slow = boring. Readers are generally nice people. They don't want to hurt your feelings. Any good writer can hurt their own feelings by translating words like "slow" into "boring the pants off of me, turning my eyelids to cement, making me crave a root canal to distract from the monotony." Okay, we writers tend to go overboard with the self-deprecation.

If readers say that a particular section was slow or took them several tries to read, they're indicating potentially slow pacing. You haven't made them care enough about what they're reading, or, in some cases, you're covering too much old ground and frustrating readers who want to move to new plot events.

A well-paced book will unfold at a consistent pace, and will always give readers a compelling reason to keep going. Most often, the reason to keep going is conflict. Sometimes it's mystery. Your characters should always be struggling and changing. If readers get bored, consider ways to shorten the section in question, cut it altogether, or weave it into a section of the book that does have clear conflict.

Finally, clunky writing can slow the pacing. If you sent a book out to beta readers but none of them finished despite their pinky swears, take a hard look at your opening chapters. In addition to conflict, is your writing tight and engaging? Check yourself on passive language. I like this article on passive voice because it dispels the notion that passive voice is always bad, and gives examples of when and when not to use it. Check for overuse of adverbs (we don't believe that adverbs are evil but they can certainly be overused). Check for tedious reiterations of things you've already said in slightly different ways. Check for filter words and awkward phrasings. Read the opening aloud in front of a frenemy and you should be able to tell immediately if there's something wrong with the writing. 

"The X part felt a little too quick, and/or confused me."

When readers are confused or feel that events unfold too quickly, it could be a sign of inconsistent pacing. At the Spun Yarn, we often see this in the last quarter of the book. An author finds herself with too many loose ends to tie up, or isn't sure about how to end the story and it shows in an overly convenient ending or an ending that leaves too many questions unanswered. 

1. Make sure your subplots are resolved. Map them out and address each one, even if only in passing. The point is to instill the reader with confidence that you're not wildly abandoning subplots along the path behind you: that you have a plan, that you haven't forgotten anything.  
2. If every subplot's resolution occurs in the last quarter of the book, see if you can resolve a few of them earlier to make the pacing consistent. Minor subplots can be resolved a bit earlier, and spacing them out can quell the heartburn that comes from a placid third quarter followed by an explosive, chaotic finale. 
3. Cut some subplots altogether if they're not strongly contributing to the story enough. 

If you receive this feedback about 'too much at once' or 'it's confusing' at the beginning of your story, tease out whether readers are content to stick with you and trust that their questions will eventually be answered, or whether readers seem overwhelmed and panicked. If the latter, try taking more time to cover the critical elements first, and saving other characters / mysteries / subplots / settings for later. 

We notice in Spun Yarn comments that readers are often willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for the first quarter of the book, as long as they don't continue feel overwhelmed in the second quarter of the book. 

Let us know in the comments: was this helpful? Were you rolling your eyes at the lack of new information, or panicked at seeing terms you didn't recognize? If the latter, check out this brief primer on pacing from the always helpful Writer's Digest.