The 8 biggest mistakes 🤦‍♂️

(with Facebook Ads)  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Hey, Lots of authors are having issues with Facebook Ads these days. Understandably so because it’s an increasingly complex system and Meta’s attempts to simplify things invariably backfires. These are some of the most common errors I see. 1. biting off more than you can chew Facebook Ads is complicated enough as it is, but people make life more difficult for themselves – trying to run before they can walk. I always advise starting off with a basic approach. One ad, one ad set, one campaign. Point it at Amazon USA. Get your Kindle edition selling in America and then you can look at expanding to other international markets and/or retailers. Learn how to sell books before trying to boost your mailing list. Get static image ads working first and then you can try video. Explore interest targeting before custom audiences and lookalikes. I get messages from people who are trying to build a landing page and a digital bookstore at the same time as wrapping their heads around the Pixel – all before they have basic ads working for them. It’s too much for anyone to tackle at once. And there is no way you will be able to parse all those variables at the same time. Or I see people trying to use custom audiences and lookalikes way before they are ready (i.e. when they have a significant list or Page audience to work with). I recommend the basic approach to begin with because it minimizes variables and allows you to establish fundamentals which work for you. You cycle through your targets. You cycle through your ad images. And then perhaps to a lesser extent, you cycle through your ad text variations. Keep cycling through those three and you will find a path to success. Trying to do all that while building all that other stuff is making things incredibly complicated. I’m not suggesting there is no value in direct sales or landing pages or video ads or custom audiences or lookalikes. I am saying that keeping things simple – until you learn the ropes and can create consistently profitable ads – is the most manageable path to success. 2. trusting facebook’s defaults Like the entire tech industry, Facebook has invested heavily in AI and is pushing it everywhere it can, whether you want it or not, or whether it works or not. To be fair, it can work well if you are selling generic products to a general audience from your own website – that’s what the system is designed to serve. But readers have extraordinarily niche tastes and authors are generally pointing traffic to websites we don’t control, like Amazon. Which means Facebook and its fancy AI systems are flying blind and they don’t know when someone clicks on an ad, goes to Amazon, and decides the book isn’t for them. And if we don’t corral Facebook’s AI, it will go off the rails and serve our ads to more and more of the wrong readers. Which means I generally advise setting up ads manually and changing the defaults suggested by Facebook during the ad creation process. Wresting back control, in other words, so you can steer your ads in a different direction – one that works better for authors. I go through this carefully in my hour-long video tutorial to creating winning Facebook campaigns. 3. rushing the fundamentals Facebook’s ad creation interface is spectacularly unhelpful, so it’s easy to get distracted from what are the core fundamentals – the biggest influencers over the success of your ad: targeting image text The ad image is what stops the scroll. It should scream the genre of your book – which is why I generally default to using the book cover in the ad image, and the book cover art as the background as well. The ad text is what will seal the deal – and my go-to is to use the tagline for the book and then a call-to-action, like “Download now on Kindle,” or some variation thereof. If the book is free or discounted, I will absolutely mention that in the ad text, and in the image as well. Or if it is a new release. Those are all big hooks for readers. But no matter how arresting your image is or how hooky your text, none of that will matter one iota if your ad is pointed at the wrong people – making targeting the most fundamental, errrr, fundamental of all. I generally place them in that order of importance: targeting, then ad image close behind, and then ad text quite far in the distance, although not unimportant. A great ad image can win the click all on its own, if pointed at the right people, but ad text can sweep up a few waverers so is worth honing. Check out The Three Keys to Success on my Facebook Ads for Authors resource page. 4. not following your own data I share my experience as someone who started in digital advertising over twenty years ago for one of the biggest companies on the planet, managing ad spends of $40m a year, and someone who went on to run huge Facebook campaigns for bestsellers in a wide range of genres over the last decade – sending books to the very top of the Amazon charts. But what I say matters way less than what your own data tells you. I try to share my experience to shortcut the process for you, to nudge you in the direction which I think will give you the shortest path to success. However, if you get better results from, say, not using your book cover in your ad images, then don’t use your book cover in your ad images. If you get better results from targeting broadly and letting the AI run wild, then go crazy. It can be useful to listen to someone else’s insights, but ultimately you should test things yourself and follow your own data. Now with that out of the way, let’s get back to my strong opinions which are blind to my own prejudices. 5. focusing too much on the landing page There is a certain school of thought out there which seems to blame all ad performance woes on the landing page – i.e. your product listing on Amazon. I can’t help feeling that at least some of this is driven by people selling things like services to write book descriptions. Real talk: your product should be in great shape before you spend any money on advertising. That means your book, your cover, your description, your tagline – presentation and packaging. I work from the assumption that you will have solved those issues before you invest money in learning Facebook Ads – because you really should or you can end up wasting a lot of money. And that goes for all marketing, really. Ideally, you solve all those problems before hitting Publish, but it’s totally normal to tweak things afterwards – or even make drastic changes and replace a cover completely, for example. We’ve all done that at various points. But if your landing page is in reasonable shape, then your focus should be on those fundamentals of targeting and ad creative (text + image). And I’d recommend spending most of your time on the image and the targeting. It’s not so difficult to come up with some workable text and I think the image and targeting are fair bigger factors influencing performance. Certainly worth more of your time than noodling once more on a landing page that is probably in good enough shape IMHO. 6. blaming “the algorithm” I have a lot of sympathy for people who run into problems and blame “the algorithm” so I’m saying this without judgment – in the hope that speaking bluntly is most useful here. But we really do need to stop anthropomorphizing things like algorithms and ascribing cognition to them and so forth. They aren’t capricious deities, or particularly inscrutable for that matter. We might not always know why an ad succeeds or fails (or indeed why one will start hot and then suddenly dip), but refocusing on fundamentals is almost always the path out of any morass. Targeting, ad image, ad text. The trifecta of Facebook Ads success. Well, given that I place more importance on the image and the targeting, maybe it’s the tricycle of ad success? You know, two big wheels on the side and a smaller one up front. Never mind… 7. misunderstanding andromeda Speaking of nonsense, there’s an entire cottage industry built around Facebook’s Andromeda update – which completely misunderstands what it is about, selling solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. There are many different reasons that a given author might be struggling with Facebook Ads in 2026, but Andromeda is unlikely to be one of them because it’s simply an ad retrieval system, not some major change to algorithms affecting performance. People believe all sorts of nonsense about Facebook – helped both by Facebook’s opacity and the army of techbros selling magic beans. The real cost of focusing on an invented problem is missing the actual one. Aside from the price of those magic beans, I guess. If you want to dig into this topic a little more, go here. 8. too many creatives One thing Andromeda has encouraged is people making lots and lots of creatives – i.e. different variations of ad images and text. Andromeda enables Facebook’s system to handle the huge increase in creative variations that users are providing, encouraged by Facebook, its suit of genAI tools, and the Facebook Ads advice industry for the most part, I guess. The system genuinely is much better now at determining which of your creatives is a winner and what should be shown to whom. And given the outsized importance I’ve placed on the ad image you might think I’m going to suggest generating lots and lots of them as well. However, I want to row against the tide again here and suggest something else. You might get better results if you really focus hard on producing 1 or 2 or 3 really good images, rather than two dozen half-hearted ones. And definitely stay away from the AI slop – there’s a healthy chunk of readers who will likely assume your book was AI-generated too, fairly or unfairly. Friction is death to an ad – eliminate it. more resources for you Don’t forget, you’ll find solutions to all these issues, and so much more, on my Facebook Ads for Authors resource page – exclusively for my subscribers. Hope that was useful, Dave PS Writing music this week is Lord Beginner with Victory Test Match. Interesting Paths, Apartado 108, Loja CTT, Lagos, Faro 8601-902 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​