rank structure

That's a more in depth answer than I expected. You could have just said she's a marine pilot and that would have made sense. Word of caution you seem to have a depth of world building the reader isn't going to see which is good I never discourage any author from doing the full Tolkien, but if the average reader sees none of this it looks inconsistent. I passionately hate amazon trolls and I think its shit how one bad review weighs way more than multiple good reviews and if the reader doesn't see the depth of your world building it opens you up to unreasonable criticism that you don't understand military rank structure when in fact you do your world is just vastly more complicated than it first seems. You have overwhelming positive reviews so you can likely take the hit but just saying

Yeah, that's all probably true, but I don't make my primary money from writing. I do it because I like building worlds and telling stories in them. That's also why you get these stupid long responses from me. I genuinely enjoy talking about it with you guys.

But on the reality of authoring as a financial venture, it takes me 3 to 6 months to write a novel and get it to the publish stage with reader testing and cover art etc. After advertising costs on Amazon, even with two genre best sellers in a row, between the two of them I probably made 35k profit on the book sales, so let's say 28k after taxes for roughly a years worth of work. If that's #1 in the charts money, at least at subgenre level, you can imagine that most authors need another job that lets them support this sort of thing.

That or they have to do focused work to pump out 3 or 4 novels a year and, from what I've seen, when they do that the quality suffers pretty badly. They're also then beholden to the vagaries of internet trolls and popular sentiment because if they get "canceled" they are in real world danger.

So basically what I'm saying is, this isn't my day job. :P I have two other full time entrepreneurial ventures and this is what I do with my free time instead of going to bars or clubs. From time to time, those ventures have crisis and when that happens my deadlines on releasing books shift back. I hate having to do those things but it is what it is. Needs must.

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Now on the technical authoring side, one of the things I learned writing my first six unpublished novels, is that you HAVE to build the world behind the story or you start to get the details wrong as the series continues. You absolutely will not remember a detail reference from your first book when you're 5 years down the line on the series, especially if you have another series running at the same time. So the world building is just part of the storytelling at its core.

Also notably, if you plan a series to run for a dozen books, you don't just dump all that info out in book 1 or 2, it drips into the over-arcing story as it unfolds, and that creates an incentive to revisit the series later and catch the early hints you missed. I have notes up to book 6 now, and I still haven't explicitly introduced the large scale conflict that will have to be resolved on the back half of the arc. Cowboy Bebop is a good example of this, if you ever watched that series. the Vicious arc was dripped in slowly until the last fourth of the series, then it came all at once and hard. Absolute masterpiece.

What nobody likes is something you see in a lot of the Hollywood drek these days, exposition dumps, where some character starts talking to another character about the world and how it works... as if that character hasn't been living there their whole lives and already knows all that stuff. So instead, you let it out in little hints and details in the storytelling that flow naturally from the scene itself. "Show don't tell" is easier said than done, and you have to keep a constant eye on it lest you drag your scenes down and put your audience to sleep.

But if you do the details and hints well, what you then get is the most fun part of any fandom. Fans coming back and debating details they caught on the second or third read-through that others might have missed. I always loved those conversations with my friends, even the arguments that would sometimes spawn from them. Nothing shows more investment in a story than that.

Oh and also, if you really like those sorts of details, that's gonna be the reward the Patreons get once it's up and running. I'm formalizing a lot of my Series Bible into entries from the in-world AIncyclopedia and fans can comb through them to get a greater sense for the world itself.