DESPERATELY FINDING FEEDBACK
From the OTHER SIDE OF THE DESK
Submitting authors are often desperate for feedback on their rejected manuscripts, but literary agent Piers Blofeld argues that their best option is to sharpen their own critical facilities
One of the hardest things for aspiring writers is the feeling that you exist in some sort of vacuum or bubble where you throw your words out into an uncaring void and all you ever get back is silence. Feedback is the hardest word and it is common to see threads on social media complaining about the lack of it from people like me, with some frankly justified complaints that as an industry publishing is pretty bad at basic courtesy and that can all too easily look like snobbish indifference to writers who aren’t connected or privileged in some other way.