This is not comic related...

Five years ago I wrote a novel and have been trying to sell it ever since. Obviously I haven't met with much success, but I also haven't received any feedback as to why. This is not unusual -- publishers receive metric tons of submissions that they have to wade through and usually the best they can manage is to send back a letter that says "no thanks, but good luck" -- but it also isn't particularly helpful to me, because it doesn't give me a lot to go on.

If five years sounds like a lot of time to you, by the way, it really isn't. The fastest response I ever got from a submission was from DAW books -- 3 months -- and I've been waiting to hear back from Baen for about a year and a half now. This is not a speedy process. Still, the longer I sit around waiting, and the more I go back through the manuscript that I submitted, the more my unease increases.

Is there something fatally flawed in the story that I can't see, because I'm too close to it?

Is there something wrong with the style?

Is the genre too old hat?

Is there a section that is so poorly edited that editors are actively trying to block the manuscript out of their mind?

(This last part is feasible. I discovered, to my horror, that the manuscript I'd sent to DAW was riddled with "junk text" -- the file I'd been using had become slightly corrupted and a number of chapters looked like I'd just been banging on the keyboard with my head for hours on end. That was particularly embarrassing.)

Because editors don't have the time (or sanity) to individually critique each submission, authors have to look to other areas for the same thing. Usually I just hand it to friends and family and say "READ THIS AND TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!" and then run off before they can say "no"... but you know, I only have so many of those...

But then I thought "hey -- I have readers! Some of them might be interested in looking through this thing and ripping it to pieces!" So this is a request for readers who might be interested in looking through my novel with the express purpose of telling me a) what works, 2) what doesn't, and iii) whether or not it's the kind of thing that would tempt you at a book-selling-type-store.

Here's how I see it working: if I can get a group of you to volunteer, I'll set up a private forum on another domain where you can log in and read and/or download the book, then chat it up on the forum itself -- tell me what works, what you thought was clever, what you thought was mind-numbingly stupid, be as critical and specific as you can manage. I will read your comments and ask questions. This will give me more of a feel for what I might need to work on if/when it comes time to revise the thing.

So if you would be interested in being a test subject, please email me at wrightc -at- ubersoft -dot- net with [NOVEL] stuck in the message title somewhere. And thank you in advance for you brave souls who volunteer.

UPDATE: Thanks for your quick response! I have a pretty good group at this point, I think.