Why do novels get rejected?

I read a really interesting post this morning by Janet Reid. She's an agent and in the post breaks down why she rejected/accepted the 124 novels she asked to read in full over last six months or so. A lot of the reasons were solvable - slow pace for example, or structural issues. A few needed more editorial work that she had time to give. Others were good novels, but not right for her - these she referred to other agents. In the end she made two offers out of the 124.

It's such a lottery. What Janet Reid may see as being slow, another agent may see as being gentle or subtle. I didn't find The Da Vinci Code to be a page-turner, but I accept that I am a rare exception and not the rule.

If the odds are 124:2 (and that's for novels she asked to see on the basis of a few chapters), then we have to accept that individual taste is going to play a bigger part than we'd like. Not everybody likes everything, in just the same way that I don't like red wine or mushrooms, but love licorice and aniseed. We can't do anything about that. What we can do is make sure that the sortable stuff - pacing, structure, editing etc - is as good as we can make it before we send out. It is a lottery, but we can, with work, swing the odds in our favour.