June 27th, 2026   •   4 minute read   •   Issue #160

"Matt, my ads aren't working."

It's one of the most common messages I get from authors.

Sometimes it's a polite question. Sometimes a quiet frustration. Always the same conclusion underneath it: I've tried, I've spent, and I'm running out of ideas.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about ads.

They're almost always working.

They're just not telling you what you wanted to hear.

Ads Don't Sell Books. They Diagnose Them

When you put money behind a book on Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, or BookBub Ads, you're not really running an ad campaign.

You're running a stress test on your whole author business.

Your cover, your blurb, your price, your reviews, your series order, your readthrough. Every single one of those things gets graded the moment a stranger sees your book for the first time.

The ads just turn the lights on.

So when an author tells me their ads aren't working, what I actually hear is: my ads are giving me information I don't like, and I'm trying to solve it inside the ads dashboard.

Almost no ad problem ever gets fixed inside the ads dashboard. Some problems do, sure, but not many.

What The Data Is Actually Saying

These are the patterns I see most weeks, and what they actually mean.

Good clicks, no sales. Now we've left the ad and taken the reader to your book product page. Something on that page failed them. Usually the blurb. Sometimes the price. Sometimes the cover doesn't deliver on the promise the ad made. The ad did its job. The book product page didn't.

Good sales on book one, nothing after. Usually a readthrough problem. Your series isn't holding readers, or book one isn't priced as a series starter, or readers can't find book two. Sometimes, though, it's the ad itself bringing in the wrong reader.

Getting sales, but the numbers don't work. You're earning $2 a sale and spending $3 to get one. That's not a campaign failure. That's a business model problem. The ad is honest. The economics of the book, the series or the catalog aren't there yet, usually because the readthrough or the price points haven't been set up to compound.

In every one of those scenarios, the author wants to A/B test their headline.

The data is begging them to fix something on the book product page – the ads are fine.

What I See Most Often

I started running ads on my wife's books in 2020 with no idea what I was doing. Six years later, I've looked at thousands of author ads across multiple genres, price points, and platforms.

The pattern is almost always the same.

The author writes to me convinced the ad is broken. I look at the cover, the blurb, the price, the readthrough, before we ever open an ads dashboard. Nine times out of ten, the fix is upstream of the ad.

Not because the platform is easy. It isn't. But because the cheapest, fastest gains almost always live in the parts of the business the ad is shining a light on.

Not All Sales Are Equal

There's a subtler version of this that the patterns above don't capture, and nobody warns you about it.

I've seen campaigns that crushed it on book one and were terrible for readthrough. The creative pulled in impulse buyers who'd never have committed to the series. Book one numbers looked great. Book two, three, four, and the back-end royalties, nothing.

I've seen the opposite just as often. Campaigns that did nothing flashy at the top. Book one sales were decent. Good, but nothing to write home about. The ad would look ordinary on a dashboard. But the readers it brought in went on to read the whole series, and the back-end income told a completely different story.

Same dashboard. Same metric. Wildly different verdict, depending on what you look at next.

This is why "are my ads working?" is almost always the wrong question. Working at what? Over what window? On which book in the series?

You can't grade an ad on book one alone. The honest answer lives further down the funnel, in the readthrough, in the page reads, in the income from book three, a few months down the road.

Stop Fighting The Mirror

The most expensive habit in author advertising is treating the ad platform as the problem.

Because if Facebook Ads is the problem, then the answer for many authors is another tactic, another targeting tweak, another course. You can spin in that loop for months, even years. I've watched authors do it. I've done it myself. 

But if the ad platform is just a mirror, the answer is something cheaper and faster. Look at what it's reflecting back. Then go and fix that thing, where it costs you nothing but a few hours of attention.

A new cover beats a new ad creative.

A rewritten blurb beats a new audience.

A repriced series beats a new bid strategy.

Every. Single. Time.

This is why I keep banging on about foundations. Not because foundations are sexy, or fun, or what most authors came here to learn. But because they're where the money actually leaks out, and ads only ever expose the leak.

Your ads aren't broken.

They're honest.

And once you read them as information rather than judgement, the next move usually shows up on its own.

To Your Success
– Matt