Rate the people giving you feedback on a personal scale of "How close are they to my target audience?"

Not everyone will be equally close to your target audience. If you aim to write a book for people that are probably in their early twenties, mostly read sci-fi and love complicated plots you might want to rate the answers from people with a focus on sci-fi different from people who sometimes read sci-fi, but mostly urban-fantasy romance. Maybe the sci-fi "sci-fi" person will tell you that there is enough descriptions and the "urban fantasy" person will tell you that you should focus more on the appearance of your characters - but as the latter is farther away from your target audience you should not immediately jump at that feedback.

Try to make a list that defines your "ideal target audience" and then rate the people that give you feedback on a scale of "not very close", "medium" and "very close" for each point. Where they differ from your target and what feedback they give you can also play an important role - appearances might be more important in urban fantasy then in sci-fi for example.

This approach allows you to then note their feedback and assign tags to the feedback, such as "Do immediately - target audience doesn't like it", "Collect and do together with other stuff in this category as a slightly bigger re-write - target audience is neutral towards this and non-target audience doesn't like it" and "Remember if I ever come across this for some other reason and it's not too much work then - target audience doesn't care and non-target audience is neutral".

These are over-simplified categories and you will never be completely accurate - it's just a tool to give you an idea of which feedback is more relevant to you and your situation so that you don't get lost in the feedback from people that are not as close to your target audience as others. You shouldn't make this ranking public of course, it's enough to keep it as a personal (mental) note. If you know the people more closely you can even assign extra categories like "I know he hates certain types of characters, but this character has to be like it - any feedback regarding this character can more or less be ignored unless it's obviously really, really bad".

The more you know about the people giving you feedback the better.

You (or your publisher) is the final arbiter

If you still don't know what to do because multiple different ways come from relevant people and you don't have a publisher who wants to have a say in the final matter then there really is only one person you can trust - you.

If you can't decide - throw a coin

There is a little trick I sometimes use: Assign one way to the "Heads" side of a coin, the other to the "Tails" site of the coin and throw it. Depending on which side comes up you will feel something. Maybe you don't like the result - then you know that you shouldn't do that. Maybe you like it - then your subconciousness wants to tell you to do that. Maybe it feels empty - then you don't care and should do what is the least amount of work so that you can continue with the important parts and come back to this obviously less dramatic problem later.

There is no rule of thumb

The rule of thumb depends on your target audience, your genre, your publisher, your personal goal, your writing style and on the person giving you the advice and feedback - and probably on at least a dozen more things.

There is no general rule of thumb.

If you think "I already have so much description, why should I add more?" it's probably too much already, if you think "She may have a point..." it's probably not enough and if you think "Who cares?" then it doesn't matter for what you are trying to achieve.

We would need to read your book

Every feedback needs to be tailored specifically for the work in question. In your case we would need to read your entire book to tell you what we think - which is the same situation you are in currently where some people will tell you that it's too much and others will tell you it's not enough.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!