Audience

So I received my first rejection from one of the agents I pitched at the Writing Conference in NYC. She said she read the first 50 pages of my novel and came to this conclusion: young girls in their twenties wouldn't be interested in it, because it was written in present tense and about a young girl in the late eighties, not gritty enough for current days. And women in their forties and fifties wouldn't be interested in it--they would only be interested in it if it was written in past tense, with a narrator now in her mid-forties, looking back on her days in her mid-twenties. . . hmmm. . . . When I wrote this novel I thought nothing about audience in such a specific way, okay, I didn't think about my audience at all. . . Someone very wise once told me to put all marketing aspects out of my mind when I write, and it's the only way I was able to write a novel from the heart . . . Another wise person told me that you have to write for yourself--the publishing business is too competitive to count on. Writers are weeded out for a million different reasons: one common one being that the agent is already representing a novel too similar to the one in question. . . maybe one about a woman in her mid-forties who goes back to the Jersey Shore and reminisces about her time spent there in her mid-twenties. . . Another wise person said, and this one was an agent: "The chaos theory is at play here". . . Who would've guessed that all ages, young and old, of both sexes, would be drawn to Harry Potter? Or that women of all ages are being seduced by Twilight. I honestly don't think it's about relating to a character--it's more about being transported to another world.