Note that in those conditions, on a moonless night, the Milky Way will cast your shadow on the ground.

Enjoy your next visit, friend. :)

And I appreciate it!

I'm just saying that "AMAs aren't the place for critical feedback" is also a valid take.

> He’s not giving advice to a random person not asking for it.

That's exactly what I did. I didn't have a question for him.

When I wrote my comment, the AMA post was at 0 karma, he'd gotten like 3 replies after 4 hours, and he had already gone to bed. I thought the thread was going to disappear forever or I'd have maybe PMed him. But that seemed a little too direct. It wasn't an attack.

I don't know if he was receptive to it or if he was raging in private (or both, lol). Or even if he plans to ignore it all. None of that's my business. "Thank you for your feedback" was a super professional response, and it impressed me.

You're welcome! I'm sorry it wasn't more positive, but with every single book you publish you'll improve, and of course in a year you can go back and refresh your titles. Better cover? Better blurb? Easy and simple. It all comes with experience. So keep writing, keep improving, and again, best of luck!

Hey, I'm sorry you didn't get traction on this AMA.

As someone with almost a decade in indie publishing, I see so many missteps in the launch. The cover looks YA, but doesn't read as sci-fi at all. The blurb shouldn't quote your opening lines, and is structured wrong. You don't have a series, you have a single book, and there's no reason at all to give away your book for free. (You shouldn't discount/freebie the first book in a series until the series has five books, at which point, go wild.) Why would you offer the paperback for $9.99 for a limited time only? You probably shouldn't announce that this is your first published book; it's only going to turn people away. Meanwhile you claim you're a romance, sci-fi author, but the book is categorized as fantasy, contemporary, and romance.

The book itself isn't my style, so I won't say much about it. Just that the formatting (one sentence per line most of the time) makes things difficult to read. If you have to put a guide before the story begins that explains how to read the textual conventions because they're so weird (and did you make sure the "start" marker in the ebook includes this and doesn't start with the prose?) then you should seriously think about the prose style.

But good luck, and publish the rest of the series as fast as you can. The momentum will only help, and I hope you find your reader base that loves what you've done.