Reader feedback is the kind that comes from people who have read your story and are able to offer insight into what works and what doesn’t. They may be able to help you make improvements that are invisible to you as the author. That’s why having a group of beta readers (people who give you story feedback for free) and a developmental editor (who can charge for their services) are great ways to get reader feedback on your manuscript.
However, while you do want to look for commonalities in the responses of your beta readers, you also need to remember that a reader’s response is based on their individual experiences with the text. Some reader response theorists put the reader in control of their literary experience, while others think that a literary work’s form and principles dictate what commonalities occur among different readers.
When analyzing your beta readers’ comments, you want to try and understand their motivations for making the suggestions they have. If they are saying that your precocious child is irritating, for example, then you should consider what they are thinking about your character and how it would be improved if you changed the way they behaved. This will help you determine what to keep and what to change. It will also help you decide whether to ignore the suggestion or to implement it in a way that makes sense for your story. A good strategy is to go through the suggestions one at a time, starting with the most useful and moving on to the less helpful.
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