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I spent the first few months of advertising books blaming the ads for our results.

Every time sales dipped, I'd panic. New targeting. New images. New copy.

Rinse and repeat.

But here's one of the hardest lessons I've learned over the years:

The ads weren't broken. The book product page was.

We would obsess over the ad. The perfect hook. The scroll-stopping image. The targeting that'll unlock thousands of readers.

Meanwhile, our book descriptions read like Wikipedia entries.

Readers don't decide to buy your book when they see your ad. They make the decision to buy (or not buy) your book from the product page.

The ad just gets them there. It pre-sells them. Nothing more.

Here's another way to think about it:

Your ad is the movie trailer. Your product page is the cinema. If the cinema smells like damp socks and the seats are broken, nobody's staying for the show.

I've seen authors pour hundreds, even thousands of dollars into Facebook Ads. Testing, testing, testing. Trying to understand why nothing converts.

Meanwhile, their book product page is a mess—terrible blurb, amateur cover, 27 reviews with a 3.9 star rating, no A+ content.

I learned this the hard way.

Early on, I ran ads to one of my wife's books for weeks. Decent clicks. Zero sales.

I blamed the targeting. I blamed the algorithm. I blamed anything I could apart from the product page.

Then I actually read the blurb. Out loud. 

It was terrible.

Three paragraphs of backstory before anything interesting happened.

We rewrote it in an afternoon. Same ads. Same targeting. Sales started coming in the next day.

Nothing changed except the product page.

The ad platform doesn't matter. Facebook, Amazon, BookBub—they're all just different doors into the same room. And that room is your product page.

A mediocre ad with a brilliant product page will outsell a brilliant ad with a mediocre product page.

Every. Single. Time.

I've watched authors quit advertising entirely because they thought ads "don't work."

They did work. The ads brought the right people to the page.

The page just didn't close the deal.

That's an expensive lesson to learn the hard way.

So before you touch your ads again or before you launch your first ads, ask yourself:

→ Does my blurb hook readers in the first line?

→ Does my cover scream "this is my genre"?

→ Do I have enough reviews to be credible? (100+ is the inflection point I've found)

→ Does my Look Inside make people desperate to keep reading?

Fix the foundation first. Then run the ads.

If you're getting clicks but no sales, traffic isn't your problem.

Conversion is.

And conversion happens on your product page.

Not in the ad.

That's all for today.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt