October 17th, 2026   •   5 minute read   •   Issue #176

I have some version of this conversation most weeks.

An author shares their ads with me, and they’re spending about $10 a day, which is a perfectly good place to be. Then I look at where it’s going.

A few dollars on Facebook Ads for book one, a few on Amazon Ads for the new release, a little on BookBub Ads for the boxed set, and whatever’s left goes to the book from three years ago that deserves a second chance.

Four books, three platforms, ten dollars.

And I get it, I really do. It feels responsible. Every book gets a bit of help, the risk is spread out, and nothing gets left behind.

But a month later, they’re looking at four sets of numbers, and none of them are big enough to tell them anything.

So the first thing I usually suggest is backing fewer books. Not more. Fewer.

Let’s Run The Numbers

Same $10 a day, two ways to spend it. The numbers are illustrative, but they’re not far off what I see.

$10/Day Spread Across Four Books:

About $2.50 a day each, or roughly $75 per book over a month. At 30 to 50 cents a click, that’s 150 to 250 clicks per book, and if a few percent of those readers buy, each book ends up with a handful of sales.

$10/Day Spent On One Book: 

The full $300 over the month, and somewhere between 600 and 1,000 clicks.

Here’s the problem with the first option. With a handful of sales, you can’t tell whether anything’s working. One good weekend makes it look brilliant, one quiet week makes it look broken, and you end up reacting to noise rather than making decisions from true signal.

With 600 or more clicks, you can start to see what’s going on.

Are people clicking the ads? Is the book page turning those clicks into sales? Are readers going on to book two, or to the rest of your catalog?

Same money, same month. One option gets you four guesses, and the other gets you an answer.

So Which Book Gets The Money?

The simple rule is to back the book that sends readers somewhere.

If you have a series, that’s almost always book one. Readers who like it go on to book two, and your ads pay off across the whole series rather than on a single sale.

If you’ve got a catalog of standalones, focus your ad spend on your strongest one: the best reviews, and the cover that best represents what you write. Readers who love it go looking for more, through your back matter, your website, or Amazon showing them your other books.

If you write non-fiction, pick the book that leaves readers wanting more of what you teach, whether that’s your next book or a way to work with you.

Then pick one platform. For most fiction, that’s Facebook Ads. For most non-fiction, it’s Amazon Ads, because those readers are already searching for an answer.

One more thing, and it’s a big one.

Before a single dollar goes in, make sure that book is ready: a cover that fits the genre, a blurb that sells, and a price that suits the job the book is doing.

Ads don’t fix a book's product page that isn’t converting. They just send more people past it.

What You Get Back

The first thing you get back is answers: data you can act on, rather than guesses.

The second is your time. One dashboard, one set of numbers, one thing to fix at a time. That means more of your week goes back into writing, which is where most authors would rather be anyway.

And the third is that your whole catalog benefits. Every reader who finishes the book you’re advertising might pick up the next one, so the rest of your books grow without a penny of ad spend behind them.

This is how I run my own ads. I have a small group of Facebook Ads behind one $4.99 Kindle book, running since the summer and converting at 3.5% to 4%. I’ve raised the budget a little at a time because the numbers back it up.

I can only tell you that because it’s one book on one platform. If my budget, time, energy and focus were spread across four books and three ad platforms, I’d be guessing too.

Your Homework This Weekend

Open up last month’s total ad spend and count the books and ad platforms it went to.

If it’s more than one of each, and your ads aren’t paying for themselves yet, pick the book that leads readers somewhere and the platform that suits it, and give it 90 days. That’s where your biggest gains are right now.

If your ads are already profitable on one book and one platform, adding a second can make sense. But you don’t have to.

Plenty of authors keep growing on one book and one ad platform for years, and if yours still has room to grow, there’s no rush to add more.

Fewer books, done properly, will almost always do more for your catalog than all of them done halfway.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt