I get what you're saying, and when it comes to some issues, my betas have helped me in this way. But what do you do when the advice you're getting is the equivalent of one group of people saying you should bulldoze out a huge window to make the room more light and another group saying you should board up the windows because it's too light?
That's the main problem I'm having. Small nitpicks aside (most of which have been very helpful), the overall beta opinion of my chapter seems to fall into too categories: 1) it's way too slow, boring, pointless characters/info that isn't essential to the plot or 2) It's moving too fast, it feels rushed, they want more info, they want more backstory on the characters, etc.
I see this frustration come up a lot ("One reader says my book is too X and another says it's not X enough!"), so I'm going to go on a bit of a ramble...
To me, the important thing with feedback is usually not the suggestions themselves (which can be helpful, but often aren't), but attempting to understand the issue that prompted the suggestion in the first place. If one reader says the opening is too slow, and another says it's too fast, the meaningful key takeaway is simply "something in the beginning isn't working".
Likewise, with the suggestions you're citing, to me the key takeway is "The readers aren't engaged with the work." And when people aren't engaged, they often project to the things they find interesting to fix it. For people who like action and fast-paced plotting, when they're not engaged, they wish it had more of that; for people who like backstory and character detail, they're going to with it had more of that. If I cooked a dish that was very bland (not that I'm implying your book is bland), a spice-lover might say "You need to make it hotter" and a sweet-tooth might say "You need to make it sweeter", and the fact that their feedback is contradictory doesn't negate it, it suggest looking for the common element: the meal is too bland for both of them. To use a more creative example, I like smart, challenging TV (True Detective, The Wire) and I like dumb, trashy TV (Spartacus, Banshee). I really don't like the show House of Cards because I think it's neither smart enough to be stimulating nor dumb enough to be soapy fun. My formal critique on it would be "Make this smarter OR make it dumber, but where it's at right now isn't working." If you're getting a lot of contradictory feedback, I suspect something similar might be at play.
It's true that you can't please all of the people all of the time. But if you want to be a published, professional writer, you need to be able to please enough of the people enough of the time, and I do think that requires understanding beta feedback even if (especially if!) it's contradictory.
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