Read Time: 3.5 Minutes

The best decision my wife and I ever made for her author business was spending $10 a day on Facebook ads.

Back in 2020, I'd been quietly running her ads for a while, the way most authors run their own. Cautious. Conservative. Every penny accounted for. $10 a day felt big at the time. It felt like we were really going for it.

Within 18 months, that same budget was at $300 a day. On Facebook Ads alone.

And here's the part I think about a lot.

Nothing magical happened in between those two numbers. There was no breakthrough day, no secret tactic, no moment where the algorithm suddenly bent in our favour.

What changed was something quieter, and slower, and to be honest, a bit vanilla. A bit dull.

Simply put, we just got over the fear of spending more.

That was it.

I want to talk about that fear today, because I see it in almost every author I work with. And I see it in the version of me who was running ads at $10 a day and felt a little sick about it.

When you're not used to spending money on advertising, every dial you turn up feels like a personal betrayal of your bank account. Doubling a $10 budget to $20 doesn't feel like a 100% increase in spend. It feels like you've just thrown away your life savings.

So in a panicked state, you scale up. The cost-per-click jumps for a few days while the algorithm recalibrates, the sales don't follow it immediately, and you lose your nerve. You pull it back. One step forward, two steps back. For months. Sometimes years.

I lost a lot of months to exactly that loop.

Here's the mindset I adopted that finally got me past it.

Spending $300 a day to make $600 is better than spending $30 a day to make $60.

Same multiple. Very different business.

The reason most of us don't believe that line, even when we know the numbers are right, is that we're confusing two different things.

We're confusing risk with discomfort.

Spending $300 a day on a broken ad is risky. Spending $300 a day on an ad that's already proven it can return $600 isn't risky. It's just uncomfortable.

And most of us would rather be safe and small than uncomfortable and growing.

For a long time, I was the same.

The $10 a day budget wasn't actually keeping us safe. It was capping the engine. Every day I left it there, when $20 would have also worked, and $50 after that, and $100 after that, was a day of royalties I was choosing not to earn for my wife. Not for any good reason. Just because the bigger number scared me.

The thing nobody tells you about scaling ads on a book that's already working is that almost none of the fear is rational. It's all emotional.

The fear comes from the size of the number, not the unit economics behind it. A profitable ad at $10 a day is the same offer as a profitable ad at $300 a day. The numbers don't change. Just the size of your nervous system's reaction to it.

The hardest part of this whole game wasn't learning how to run Facebook's Ads. It wasn't writing better copy or finding better images. It was learning to sit with the discomfort of a bigger number on a system I already knew was working.

Now, two caveats that have to live next to everything I just said.

The first is foundations.

If your cover doesn't convert, your blurb doesn't entice, and your book page isn't dialled in, scaling ads doesn't grow your royalties. It just empties your bank account faster. Foundations first. Always.

The second is cashflow.

Not every author has $300 a day available to spend on ads, even when all the signs are pointing to it being a profitable decision. And I'm not pretending otherwise. If your starting point is $5 a day, that's your starting point. Going from $5 to $10 is the same 100% scale-up as going from $30 to $60. The principle works at every level. The job is to grow the budget as the ads earn it back, not to find money you don't have.

If both of those hold, foundations in place and ads returning more than they cost, then the small budget isn't the safe choice.

It's the expensive one.

You're not protecting yourself by keeping the dial low. You're capping how much your business is allowed to give you.

When the foundations are right and your cashflow allows, the only job is to keep turning the dial up. Slowly. Repeatedly. Past the point where it feels comfortable.

To Your Success
– Matt