: Re: Uh oh - My book stinks. Now what? The question pretty much sums it up. I'm a freelance author without much of a platform. It's not that I don't like the story - I spent a great deal of

@Sue2132873

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One additional thought about getting people to read it and listening to their comments: ignore what they say.

But listen to WHY they are saying it.

Maybe they didn't like your main character and suggest you cut out a scene where he's being a real bastard. That scene is probably not your real problem. I mean, there are plenty of anti-heroes out there. Your true problem is far more likely to be that your reader doesn't empathize with him because they don't understand the internal demons that are driving this behavior.

So listen to the problem they are identifying, but then toss their comments and try to figure out WHY they are feeling that way, which is more than likely not what your readers may suggest.

In a real-world example, I have a novel that I'm wrapping up a rewrite on and the narrator tends to go off on wild, internal (and hopefully funny) tangents, commenting on the world around her.

My early readers said they were great but there were just too many of them.

What I realized when digging into it further was that it wasn't that there were too many of them per se, it was their placement in the story. They worked when we were transitioning from one scene to the next, or when they really gave us a deeper insight into the character's pysche in her alone time.

Where they didn't work was when they interrupted the flow of a scene that the reader was becoming invested in, when our narrator was actively engaging with other characters. So I went through and edited it from that perspective, cutting some of these tangents, but more importantly always making sure they were in the right place.

It made all the difference for the readers of the second draft.

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