Let’s face it, it is not about whether you have a sparkling opening line or a brilliant first page, you have to channel the zeitgeist, which at the moment seems to be romantasy (whatever that is) and locked room thrillers. There is the odd Shuggie Bain, which rightly won the Booker prize as it is brilliantly written and unique, though author Douglas Stuart received zillions of rejections. He very much feels like the exception rather than the rule.

It says it all when publishers now flock to celebrity fiction, when anyone from Simon Mayo to Graham Norton get a go. I bet they weren’t agonising over their first lines and having sleepless nights about whether the dialogue sings, only to get a terse email saying, “Not for us.”

If we’re all noticing this pattern, then I don’t think it is purely subjective. It becomes objective. I think some publishers will just go with what they think works and predominantly with writers of a certain sex, ethnicity, background, age etc. I also notice that journalists seem to get book deals but that doesn’t mean they can write a half-decent story.

So what’s the solution? I think it’s two-fold . First of all there’s networking. I’ve heard published authors say that the more conferences you go to and the more agents you meet in the flesh the more likely you are to get representation. And I totally agree with Natália that you have to know that you’re better than the competition.

Another thing to remember is that established and especially very successful authors get a lot more leeway. If you have proven that you can sell a lot of books or win a lot of prizes then your editor and publisher are a lot more flexible about what they will allow and the liberties an author can take. Sometimes that leeway is not for the best but again those authors have earned their stripes showing they can sell.

Regarding punctuation or the lack of — again it all goes back to audience. A lot of time the lack of punctuation is a choice in literary fiction and use for specific reasons. Some people hate Sally Rooney’s books because of her lack of quotation marks for dialogue. I personally never had an issue with it and love her books. The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride is written in uninterrupted stream of consciousness with little punctuation which can be very off putting for some readers, but again other people love that book and what it is trying to achieve.

When it comes to the rules — every rule in fiction can be broken if it’s done well or it serves the stories or you can get away with it, but to break the rules well I personally strongly believe that you have to understand and master the rules first. With writing you can do anything, it’s always come down to execution that the writer’s choices are validated. For example, based purely on rules the opening of Demon Copperhead is heavy on telling and backstory but it works because first the voice is very strong from the opening sentence. It pulls you in; the voice and prose really paint a vivid and immersive picture.

Of course there are books published every year that are bad, but there is a big difference between truly awful books and books that people didn’t enjoy or didn’t finish just because it wasn’t for their cup of tea.

To a certain level, books are like any other art in the sense that there is a certain level of subjectiveness. It can be frustrating because there are so little spots available and a hundred times the number of writers competing for those spots. It is hard but at the end of the day all you can do is concentrate about your writing, your stories and your own path to publication however that path looks like and shut out the outside.