The Feedback Loop

You want it you don't want it you want it

Hi friends,

Thank you to fellow Substacker Dan Hon for today’s topic: getting feedback on your work. We’ve talked about this briefly a few times but why not going into it full on, right?

Dan asks:

When’s a good time to start getting feedback from people on your draft?

First, you should be done editing your work yourself. As we talked about a bit ago, you don’t want your readers to be like oh yeah the beginning is really slow when you already know this and plan to change it. If you feel like you need to change something, you probably do, so go and do it.

If you’re done editing to the best of your ability, then share your book with your trusted advisors. That can be friends, a writing group, a person you hire, whoever is on your list. Be careful with true friends and family. They love you, so that love will extend to your work and make them more tolerant of things like slow beginnings. They’re already invested in you and your work, so you don’t have to work as hard to win them over. That isn’t true of your average reader.

You may have noticed that I’m referring to full books here. Not partial drafts. That’s on purpose.

There’s no magical time to get feedback, but there are also bad times to get it. I don’t think you should send out unedited work, and definitely not your first draft of your first 20 pages when you are still in the full blush of love with your own prose. You need to read it another 10 or 50 times to fall out of love with it so you can address it with clear eyes.

I don’t think you should send out your work when you’re trying to figure out a big problem, either. I would not suggest sending your work to your trusted advisors and be like idk should I kill the main character or not????????? It’s your book and you know the characters best. You probably have to decide that for yourself. That’s definitely the kind of thing you talk about over coffee or drinks or in your writing group. Talking it out is different than asking your people to spend hours reading something you’re going to dismantle and rewrite anyway.

If this isn’t helpful and you still need to know WHENNNNNNNN you should send out your work, try to work backwards from your next goal. After you get feedback and spend some time editing, what do you want to do? Query agents? Send to your editor? Take that date and work back two months. That’s your editing time, using the responses from your readers. From there, count back another three months. That’s the time you should give your readers to read and respond to your work. Everyone gets busy, and you’re not likely their number 1 priority. Take a chill pill.

So, you should send your work to your readers five months before you want to query, according to the above example. Which means you probably should have sent it to them <checks watch>, yesterday. Get cracking.

Dan also asked: And how do you help people give you useful feedback?

You can certainly say to people: I’m really concerned about the [ending, beginning, whatever]. Can you let me know what you think about that? That’s fine. They might not have even noticed the [ending, beginning, whatever] if you hadn’t said something, which is also useful information! That means you were worried about nothing. You can also tell readers you’re not worried about typos or stuff, or don’t need a line edit response, if that’s what you don’t need. (Readers, it’s not useful to tell your friends that they used the wrong there/their/they’re once. Seriously cut it out.) Tell them what you need. And if you’ve really done your homework and self-editing, you’ll know what you need besides a stead stream of praise and assurance you’re a genius. If you don’t know what you need, just send and let them tell you their thoughts.

What you really need to do is prepare yourself for receiving feedback, which was Dan’s third question, and which we will talk about tomorrow in the subscriber newsletter.

XOXOX,

Kate