Objectively Pursuing the Subjective Objective

In other words, trying to find a good formula for a good book when few can agree on what a "good" book is.

The subjective nature of novelling is obvious. Half the time I can't stand my own writing enough to give it a reread, yet I have readers calling me everything from "genius" to "perfect" to "a God or something." Either one side is wrong, or there's not that much of a "wrong."

That's not to say someone has to love every piece of writing. I think I'm safe in saying that (exempting over-encouraging parents and the like) no one's going to really enjoy a story of about 50 words, all of them misspelt so miserably no one can tell whether the main character's name is Angel, Angle, or Agnlee. Constant grammatical errors, likewise. A 70,000-word novel composed of only simple sentences is probably no more readable than the other two.

Once an author has a tolerable grasp of writing, though, things start to get murky. Maybe the concept is interesting, but the story seems bland and unexciting—but that was my opinion on the Twilight series (what of it I could get through), and it has a few fans out there. Maybe the plot is contrived and disorienting, but the characters and concept make up for it (what I feel about Takamagahara). Maybe some of the characters are terribly flat, but the others are interesting enough to keep things afloat, as in Brutal. 

In short, novelling seems to be a complex dance of plot points, characters, setting, concept, and others, where a good enough aspect can drag the others out of the dustbin, or a bad enough one can pull the others down into it. Exactly what can outweigh what else is up to each reader's preference.

Therein lies the frustration. What will enough people like to make a book profitable? There are trends now, but, by the time this book is written and edited, what will they be? Are my preferences similar enough to others' that I can just write what I like, and everything will work out?

I hope that last question can be answered with a "yes," because that's all I'm interested in doing. I write the stories that drive me and hope some others will tolerate it. I'm not confident that will work so well once I actually get into the business, but, when everything is so subjective, I can't predict what others' reactions will be, anyway.

Any thoughts?