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@rebekah-elizabeth No worries regarding sounding like you’re in it for money. If you create a product, it’s not wrong to want money for it. It just means you value your time and effort.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here XD

1. Middle grade is an infamously difficult genre to publish in, especially for self pubbers. Middle grade books get read because teachers make their students read them in school. Middle schoolers themselves typically have no money and there are a million amazing middle grade books at the library, so very, very few people are browsing Amazon for middle grade books to buy. And of course teachers tell their students to read books when they get attention and awards from other organizations and it’s this whole huge thing. If someone knows about this better than me, feel free to correct me. So while trad pubbing is not by any means a sure thing, if you are looking to get the intended audience and not just adults to read it, maybe you should indeed take the book down and move toward trad pubbing.
2. As it stands now, you are not doing yourself favors in the self pubbing space. You want absolutely zero people who are not your ideal customer buying your book, because the Amazon algorithm aggressively targets your book toward people similar to those who have already bought it, especially if they’ve reviewed it. Unless the ideal customer is identical to the people you’ve been asking to buy and review your book in person, they’re polluting your also-reads and therefore your chances of getting the right people to see your book without spending money on ads.
3. Your marketing and keywords seem like you’re targeting young adult, but this is a clearly middle grade book. Even if the protag is nineteen, she acts like she’s ten to twelve, and honestly the reading level and life issues the characters seem to be dealing with is just much lower than I’d expect from a YA book. That’s not a bad thing at all if this is the story you want to tell, it just would be a much better fit if aimed at a much lower audience.
4. That said, your marketing on KDP needs an overhaul. Your cover looks nothing like the best sellers in your competitive field (for future reference, you might be able to find usable, cheap covers at goonwrite dot com) and your blurb is far, far too long while not stimulating much interest. In the short term it’d be immediately more effective by starting it at “Kamera Oyama’s dad died…”, line breaking with “Kim Higashi’s parents…” and “When rumors arise…” and then putting a period at the end of it all.
5. Your editing needs a lot of work. You need many more paragraph breaks, need to format your ebook better (I’ve heard Reedsy works really well. If you want someone else to do it, plenty of people on Fiverr do excellent formatting for cheap).
6. This is the really tough part, and I’m sorry in advance >.> Um, considering the story is about Japanese people, the authenticity of the setting and characters seems lacking to me. My only experience with Japanese culture and language comes from 9 years in karate, 2 years in BJJ, and an embarrassing number of years as an utter weeb. I’m not exactly an expert on Japanese living, but a lot of things stood out as glaringly wrong to me. From her saying “Sendai, Japan” while ignoring the prefecture, to her putting on shoes inside the house, to the fact she refers to a couch and not a bed as a futon, to Shinto being described as a religion, to her making an English-based pun on Akio’s name while ostensibly thinking and speaking in Japanese, to estimation of hundreds of yen being a lot of money instead of, like, a few bucks, to her acting as though sushi is the quintessential Japanese dish and pizza is a strange and wondrous thing, to referring to people’s first names as if it were nothing… This feels like you really like Japanese culture but need to do a lot more research as to how people live from day to day in the place you’re writing about. As an aside, I think the use of Japanese terms in the middle of all the English text would be fine if you were intending it as a chapter book or as middle grade, but when you’re using words with very simple English translations (konnichiwa, ohayo gozaimasu) and you’re not trying to educate kids about a different culture, it comes off as odd. Not to mention the PoV just doesn’t seem very Japanese to me. I have no perspective to say that as someone who knows no Japanese people and has only read a handful of books from like four Japanese authors, but to me Kamera felt like an American girl undercover as a Japanese girl. PoV seeming Japanese or not, if you do submit this to a lit agent, it is essential you address the authenticity first. Ideally you should corner some people who actually live in Japan and force them to be authenticity readers.
7. Aaaaaaaaall that said… Japanese kids love cheesy vigilante superheroes who fight evil. The look-inside didn’t show me far enough that I could see what the action would look like, but I’d expect something way more Kamen Rider and way less dress-up-in-a-ninja-gi-that-probably-has-no-root-in-historical-reality like the cover shows if it were authentic to kids in Japan.

I… hope some of this was helpful. Sorry to be so negative -.-