You know what I love about the internet? The transparency of information.

Writers used to work in a void. We typed stuff up, we sent it out, and mostly it got rejected. Eventually an editor bought it; we got paid, it got published, and we basically never heard anything about it ever again. Sometimes a fan letter or two would roll in. Sometimes a story got picked up for a reprint anthology. But mostly? Nada.

Compare that to the reader responses to DSF stories. Omigosh -- feedback! Feedback on a published story, by actual readers. How cool is that?

And the disparity of the feedback hilights something I first noticed back when I was reading slush for Jim Baen's Universe. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all story. Some readers love what other readers hate, for the very reason that the first set of readers hated it. At JBU, we had about, oh, nine slush readers ranking stories on a 1-10 scale. We almost never agreed.

If a story got ranked 8 or higher by two or three readers, we passed it up to Eric. A story that pleased five of the readers was extremely rare. I think there was only one story during my entire time at Baen's that made seven of us happy.

This ought to tell all you aspiring writers out there something about submission strategies. Your goal should not be to please every reader. If you try to do that, you will fail. Instead, you should strive to please a focused audience so thoroughly that they will advocate for the story in the face of opposition. That's how you get through the slush pile.