October 24th, 2026   •   4 minute read   •   Issue #177

Most authors running ads can’t say for sure whether they’re working.

It isn’t for want of looking. Checking the ads dashboard, checking the royalties dashboard, multiple times per day. The trouble is that nobody ever told us what “working” was supposed to look like, so every number could be good news or bad news, depending on the day.

Without a finish line, two things tend to happen.

Some authors stop too soon. A week of spend, a handful of sales, and the verdict comes in: “ads don’t work for my books.”

Others push on too fast. The ads are losing money, but surely a bigger budget will sort it out, so the daily spend goes up and the losses grow with it.

Both come from the same gap, and I think the fix is simpler than most of us expect.

The First Finish Line

Before you aim for big growth, aim for ads that pay for themselves.

That means your royalties cover what you spend on ads. Spend $300 in a month, earn at least $300 back. Nothing flashy, just break-even.

It sounds modest, but I’ve come to think it’s one of the most important milestones in an author business, and one a lot of us skip straight past on the way to chasing profit.

Why Break-Even Is A Win

When your ads pay for themselves, every reader they find has cost you nothing.

The part most authors tend to miss, though, is that the first book a new reader picks up is just the front door, whether it’s book one of a series or a standalone.

Most of the royalties come from what readers do after they’ve walked through the front door.

When we judge the ads only on the book being advertised, and forget about the rest of the series or catalog, ads look like they’re failing.

So you don’t need the first sale to cover the cost of the ad on its own. Many authors I’ve worked with are happy to lose money on that first sale, because they know where the profit comes from: read-through to their other books.

If you’re at a place where you’re spending on ads what you’re earning in royalties, that isn’t a bad place to be. You’re essentially growing your readership for free, and from there, every improvement you make (a stronger blurb, a better price, a clearer path to the next book) tips the numbers towards profit.

Why 90 Days

I like 90 days as the window for getting there, for a few reasons.

It’s long enough to do things in the right order. Most authors need a few weeks to check the foundations before spending a dollar on ads: cover, blurb, product page, price, and the back matter that sends readers on to the next book. Ads can’t fix any of those. They just send more people to see them.

It’s long enough to learn one platform properly. That’s Facebook Ads for most fiction authors and Amazon Ads for most non-fiction authors, with a small group of ads running long enough to tell you something useful.

And it’s long enough for read-through to show up. Readers rarely finish book one the day they buy it (though there are exceptions to this), so if you judge your ads on the first week, you’ll miss most of what they actually earned.

But 90 days is also short enough to keep you focused. It’s a window rather than a vague someday, and it stops the kind of drift where we tinker for a year without ever knowing whether we’re closer.

I’ll be honest, not everyone gets there in 90 days. Some get there a lot quicker, others take a little longer.

When ads aren’t paying for themselves, though, the reason is nearly always upstream of the ads. The cover doesn’t fit the genre, the blurb reads like a synopsis, the price leaves no room for the cost of finding a reader, or there’s nowhere obvious for readers to go next.

Find that, fix it, and the same ads can start to look very different.

And if your ads already pay for themselves, that’s a superb place to be. Your next finish line is scaling them carefully, one budget increase at a time, as the numbers allow.

Something To Try This Weekend

Work out where you stand today. It takes about ten minutes.

→ Add up what you spent on ads in the last 30 days, across every platform.

→ Add up the royalties from every book in your catalog over the same 30 days, including Kindle Unlimited page reads, paperbacks and audio.

→ Put the two side by side.

It isn’t a perfect measure, because some of those sales would have happened without the ads. If you have a month from before you started advertising, set that alongside it too.

If royalties are ahead, your ads are paying for themselves. If ad spend is ahead, you’ve got a gap to close, and now you know how big it is.

Either way, you’ve swapped a feeling for a number, and that’s where most good decisions start.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt