Please bless me with your success energy. I'd love to have a book hit the triple-digit ranks, holy crap.
Come by and say hi over in LitRPG Books on FB, or the LitRPG Forum or GameLit Society. I think there are quite a few Heartstrikers fans there fwiw, since I read so much. it took me a little while catching on to what was going on at the beginning of the audiobook. I picked up on it eventually. Reading a book a day tends to make them a bit fuzzy after a while. (Listened to the Heartstrikers audiobooks enough time those are pretty well embedded).
Be blessed! Also, thanks! What you are seeing is the power of Rachel Aaron really though. I am just riding on her shoulders here.
Niether do I. But much of the cast are of ages that border the upper end of YA (19ish), so I see the logic. Often the age of the protag is the #1 determining factor for whether a book shoild be YA or not. Its certainly not content cause there are loads of bloody, dark, and/or raunchy YAs out there. I wish we used movie ratings instead. Cause FFO would def be rated R.
Moved from GA to CO, still managed to get FFO3's first draft finished. Now I have to pray I can rush* it through the edits in time to enter post-production in August. Otherwise, it's not coming out this year. (Cause I don't do December releases). *If it's not good enough after the first round of edits then it's gonna be a 2020 release. I am proud of FFO2 so far. It has a 4.9 rating (!) and has made a tidy profit. People who liked book 1 apparently really love book 2.
I did the audiobook of ffo2. excellent. yeah, no sense rushing the editing - skimping there can take an awesome book down to an ok book. (I just ran into that on a book I read last night).
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. I hear ya. I say rushing, but that's not really the right term. Normally, I'd clean up the book for 6-8 weeks before Rachel takes a look at it and gives me her editorial letter. Then I'd do another 6-8 weeks of edits integration and prose improvements. FFO has been my apprenticeship series under her so it's our normal process + learning phases for me. This time, we're skipping cleanup and I'm not spending tons of time on polishing my prose. That'll save about 3 months. She's reading the rough draft, then I'll get editorial from her, integrate it, and pass it all back to her for the finishing work. I will learn fewer lessons this way, but the final quality shouldn't be affected. We are still fixing story issues and Rachel will still be bringing the book/prose up to her amazing level. Thankfully, there's less need for those learning phases now. Not saying I don't have a lot to learn still, but at least my writing has leveled up since starting the FFO series. I mean, FFO3's rough draft is as well-written as the polished version of FFO2 that I first gave Rachel to read.
I do very much love her writing. Her most recent one is one the few 4 stars I've given recently. From what I've seen writers do improve and the early/first drafts start looking more like later drafts as they go.
I'll tell Rachel you said so. It'll make her smile. ^_^ Veteran author skills are no joke. I'm in the trenches as Rachel's main content editor, so I get to see the difference in our skills. Her first drafts are so good that I dream of one day writing a finished book anywhere close to the same level. It's basically finished NY-level prose right out of the gate. (even her cuts are amazing)
Travis - most of mine are 5 stars. I docked her a star for the abrupt ending. The rest of the story was amazing like usual. having almost no denouement really threw me. So that was the first 4 star instead of 5 stars for me on her books(i have to go back and rate some of them since I mostly listened to the heartstrikers on audible).
very welcome! For last 2 years I have been trying to review every book I finish. just wrote review #684
