And, like Polenth said, those are the pieces that do well because you aren't trying to please someone but rather create.
I don't know whether I have mixed emotions about this or not. The only person I ever try to please is myself. I think the entire secret of selling well is probably something we can't control. We have to write reasonably well, of course, and we have to have a good story and good characters, but for the story to appeal to a lot of people, we need teh same taste in reading the majority of the reading public shares.
So I write solely to please myself, trusting that my taste in reading is common, that I like what most people like, and most people like what I like.
This means I also trust that agents and editors share this taste, as well.
So, for the most part, I completely agree that trying to please other, trying just to create, probably works best. But only if you happen to share the same taste as a sizable percentage of the reading public. Maybe not enough of them to sell ten million copies, but enough to make and agent and editor says yes, and to sell
some copies. I don't know that it's possible to fake this shared taste, tough I could be wrong.
At the same time, however, I know I have to make some concessions in
which story I tell, in what the story has to say, and in format and structure.
But the creativity still needs to be there, and while I think sharing the same taste as the reading public is crucial, my experience is that originality is crucial, and group beta readers kill this. Dead, dead, dead. Slush piles are truly horrible, and even the well-written stories are same old, same old, same old, even though every darned one seems to have gone through a dozen or more beta readers. I think this is largely because so many beta readers try to turn a story into something they've read before. Writer X does this, writer y does that, and you should, too. Even if they don't say this, it's behind every comment.
But if you can find that one beta reader who knows what publishable means, and who knows that originality is necessary, and who knows how to let you
create, you have someone you need to lock in your basement.