I've participated in three author AMAs over the years — two on Reddit and one in a Discord server for a specific book club — and they've ranged from deeply illuminating to profoundly disappointing. The disappointing ones share a pattern: too many questions about plot, too much fan attention rather than craft attention, and authors who've given the same answer to 'where do you get your ideas' so many times the answer is now an automated response.

The illuminating one was a conversation with a novelist I admire who was clearly tired of talking about the surface of their work. When someone asked about the sentence-level decisions in a particular scene, they came alive. We spent an hour on a single paragraph. I left knowing more about how fiction works than I had going in.

My recommendation for running a good author AMA: prime contributors with craft-specific questions in advance. Ask about decisions, not facts.