Amber asked C.S. Pacat:

Did you ever receive criticism or rejection when writing Captive Prince? If so, how did you deal with it and eventually publish?

C.S. Pacat Captive Prince started off as a web serial that garnered viral attention, and after I'd written the first two volumes in that format I tried to publish commercially, and was rejected just about everywhere - agents, publishers, you name it. But because I had so many requests for a paperback from online readers, I eventually self published, and the books shot up the charts - and after that were picked up by Penguin, where the series went on to become a USA Today bestseller.

I was lucky in that sense that I learned that rejection has nothing to do with whether a book will make it or not, or whether it will connect with readers. Publishers might reject a book because it's just not to an editor's particular taste, or because it's new - publishers are essentially venture capitalists, and if something is new it's marketing potential is zero, or at best "question mark". I was also really lucky to have had enthusiastic readers, who encouraged me along the way, and to be writing at a time when the internet and self publishing offers alternate paths for publication. My book got to prove itself to publishers in the market.

I didn't necessarily have a single method for dealing with rejection, but I remember when I was sending Captive Prince out on queries, I kept a "rejection book" where I printed and pasted all my rejection letters, and journalled my feelings about each one next to them. I found that useful to process what I was feeling, and make each rejection feel like part of a process rather than the End of All Things.

As for criticism - I think all writers receive criticism, because no book is universally liked. Liking a book is often not only a matter of personal taste, but of the exact moment in time that you read it: the book I read and loved at fifteen I might hate at thirty, and vice versa.

I think it's important to take criticism seriously but not personally. I always want to grow and improve as a writer, and I think criticism and praise both offer opportunities to do that, ways of glimpsing your work from the outside as it is received by different types of readers.

I am one of those writers who thinks that the book is made by the author and then remade by the reader's mind - remade by the act of reading - so that in a sense no two people read the same book. In that way, writing is an imperfect form of communication: you write hoping to evoke this image or this feeling in the reader, but your tools are blunt, limited, and once the reader begins to read, you the author have lost control over what exactly they will feel and experience. Thus a book that is consoling to one reader may be corrosive to another, a book that is boring to one reader may be brilliant to another, because a reader's mind is where a book springs to life.

The best advice I ever heard about criticism was from Karen Joy Fowler who was asked - but if books are subjective, how do you know when your book is working, how do you know which criticism is valid? She said (paraphrasing) that if there are people who love the book, it is working, and it's okay if there are people who don't like it, as that will happen for every book. But if the love isn't there yet, then rewrite.

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