Read Time: 3 Minutes

I had a coaching call recently that I can't stop thinking about.

An author I work with was stuck.

Her series has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Made serious money over the years. The kind of numbers most authors dream about.

Facebook Ads have always been her key driver. The engine behind everything. When Facebook works, her business works.

But lately? The ads had stopped performing.

She'd tested everything. New copy. New images. Different audiences. Budget tweaks.

Nothing moved the needle.

So we jumped on a call and dug in.

The Andromeda Effect

If you've been running Facebook Ads since July or August this year, you might have noticed something's off.

Meta rolled out an algorithm update called Andromeda.

It's changed how ads get served. How audiences get built. How the whole system decides who sees your ads.

Some authors haven't felt a thing. Business as usual.

Others have watched their results fall off a cliff. Campaigns that used to generate 100's of sales per month were reduced to ash.

This author was in the second camp.

So naturally, she assumed the algorithm was the problem. That she just needed to wait it out. Test more. Spend more. Push through.

But when we looked closer, I wasn't so sure.

The Real Problem

Turns out it wasn't just the algorithm.

It was her positioning.

We looked back at how her business was doing financially before the Andromeda update, and what do you know... performance had started to head in a downward trend in early 2025.

She'd been leaning into one angle for months. It felt right. Matched how she'd always talked about her books since the day she first published. Matched what had worked before.

But the market had moved on. Readers weren't responding to that angle anymore.

The ads were fine. The books were still great.

She was just describing them in a way that no longer resonated.

Andromeda might have made things harder. But the positioning problem was making things near impossible.

Digging Into The Reviews

Here's what we did next.

We went through her reviews. 1,000's of them. Looking for patterns.

Book 1 alone had almost 10,000 reviews with an average 4.4 star rating. Social proof wasn't the problem. Readers clearly loved the books once they gave them a chance.

So why weren't the ads converting?

What were readers actually saying about the books? What moments did they highlight? What made them recommend it to friends?

And something interesting emerged.

Readers kept mentioning a specific element of the story. Something she'd never really led with in her ads. It was always there in the background, but it wasn't the hook.

Meanwhile, the angle she'd been pushing in her ads? Barely got a mention in the reviews.

She'd been selling one version of the book.

Readers had fallen in love with a different version entirely.

The Experiment

We tried a different angle. Same books. Just a different way of framing the story to readers in the ads themselves and on the product page (the blurb and the subtitle). Leading with what they actually cared about.

Four sales on the first day. Better than it had been, but then no sales for six days. 

Wrong angle. Close, but not quite.

So we went back to the drawing board and pivoted again. Refined the positioning. Leaned harder into the thread that kept showing up in those reviews.

The ads started working again.

Not a home run overnight. But movement. Life. Something to build on.

All from changing how she talked about the book – not the book itself.

Why This Matters

Here's the thing nobody talks about:

When ads stop converting, authors panic.

They blame the algorithm. They test new headlines. They burn through budget on fresh creative. They wonder if Facebook is broken or if readers have stopped buying.

But they never question whether they're positioning their book wrong in the first place.

Your book probably has three or four legitimate angles. The romance. The mystery. The setting. The emotional hook. The character journey.

The angle that worked brilliantly last year might be dead in the water today.

Markets shift. Reader tastes change. Trends rise and fall. What felt fresh in 2023 feels stale in 2025. And when an algorithm shakeup like Andromeda hits, weak positioning gets exposed fast.

The Question Worth Asking

So if your Facebook Ads have gone sideways lately, stop tweaking campaigns for a minute.

Go and read your reviews instead.

What do readers actually love about your book? What moments do they mention? What made them tell their friends?

Is that what you're leading with in your ads?

Or have you been selling a version of your book that readers aren't buying anymore?

Sometimes the fix isn't a new campaign.

It's a new conversation.

One word, one shift, can change everything.

That's it for this week.

Thank you so much for reading and enjoy the rest of your weekend. 

See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt