"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
You are basically working for exposure until someone puts it on a screen.
And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.
[0]: used as a neutral term, not a negative one
And even if you do get selected, you may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in.
I mean, it was already nearly impossible, but now it's nearly-impossibler (nearlier-impossible?), with the social media following being almost necessary to make it even a very-long-shot instead of a no-you're-definitely-getting-rejected.
For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.
Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.
It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.
A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.
And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.
I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.
Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".
For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.
Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
Bug reports should describe the problem but often shouldn't try to prescribe a solution.
Different story if it’s family/friend - if you know them personally.