Episode Description:
In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire dives into a common fear among authors: what to do when your ads stop working. Whether you're an indie author relying on ads to sell your books or just starting to explore ad platforms like Amazon or Facebook, Claire offers practical advice and mindset strategies to help you navigate this challenge.
With insights from her own experience running ads since 2015, Claire breaks down why ads can stop performing, how to analyze their effectiveness, and what steps to take when you're frustrated or burned out by the process. This episode is a mix of actionable tactics and emotional support for authors who feel stuck with their ad strategies.
Key Takeaways
Why Ads Are Essential for Authors:
Paid ads are a key tool for reaching readers, especially for indie and hybrid authors.
Most six- and seven-figure authors rely on ads, though profitability varies.
The Reality of Ad Platforms:
Platforms like Amazon and Facebook prioritize their own profits, not yours.
Algorithms and rules are constantly changing—authors must adapt.
Analyzing Ad Performance:
Define what "working" means for your ads—are they profitable, or just underperforming?
Run the numbers to get clear on ROI (return on investment). Don’t rely solely on ad dashboards, as their data can be unreliable.
Mindset Shifts for Success:
Accept that some ads stop working and let go when necessary.
Practice emotional resilience and avoid chasing sunk costs.
Strategies When Ads Stop Working:
Lower budgets on underperforming ads rather than turning them off completely.
Seek advice or refresh your knowledge about ad platforms.
Consider outsourcing your ad management if the process is too overwhelming.
Emotional Awareness:
Acknowledge the emotions behind your frustration—fear, insecurity, or past negative experiences with data and numbers.
Approach your ad strategy with curiosity and clarity, keeping emotions in check.
Support the Show: If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with your fellow authors. Every review helps more writers discover this resource.
Join the Conversation:
Share your thoughts and questions by reaching out to Claire at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors as well as a Humor and Mystery Writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain.
If you want your writing to be your profession, you will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that paid ads are a necessary component to your strategy. This is true whether you're an indie author or you're traditionally published. The only difference is that if you're traditionally published, you don't have access to the data and sometimes the permissions you would need to run ads to your books.
You have to just hope that the publisher decides to put some of their money toward ads for you and for your book, and that whoever is running those ads knows what they're doing.
But if you're an indie or a hybrid author with some of your catalog published independently, you'll eventually go, I need to start running ads. This may be something you decide on [00:01:00] immediately prior to publishing your first book or something that comes in later, but It'll happen soon enough.
Authors who are making six, seven figures on their books, and that's revenue, not profit, are running ads. There may be like two who are an exception to this rule, so let's ignore them rather than just assume we could be them. They undoubtedly have some other advantage that we aren't seeing that helps them sell books at that high volume.
Now, just because someone is making six or seven figures of revenue and advertising doesn't mean that their ads are working well. We would want to look at ROI, or return on investment, to get a better idea of how their ads are running.
You can certainly spend 200, 000 on ads in a year to make 100, 000 in revenue, and I would not personally, So, while probably most of the six and seven figure authors that you know of are running ads, [00:02:00] not necessarily all of them are running ads well. I think that's just an important thing to note. Now, I run ads for my fiction. I've been using Amazon ads since Late 2015, I think, maybe early 2016, and I've had great success with them, and not as great success with them during that time.
I do have a degree of confidence that in the last nine years, a lot of my fiction success is a result of those ads. I have a lot of data to analyze when I'm making that assessment. I just checked before recording this, and it's something like over 200 million impressions on my ads, so that's a lot of data.
Amazon ads don't work well for each of my series, though. Some books have a better ROI than others, no matter what I try. And I have tried a lot. And then some books will sell really well for a couple years, then the ads all kind of turn to duds. Also, no matter what I [00:03:00] try.
Personally, I have never had success with Facebook ads. I'm very happy. For all those who have. And I used to have a lot more success with BookBub ads. They still kind of work, but nothing like what they used to do for me. So, I know that it's incredibly frustrating when something that used to work to sell books stops working. So today we're going to talk about that as we ask the question, what if my ads stop working?
I think it would inform our approach today and just in general to remember that Facebook and Amazon, which are the two main ad platforms for authors, they are in essence, just ad platforms. I'm not just talking about their actual ad dashboards. I'm talking about how they operate as businesses.
While they want your ads to work well enough to keep you around and keep you paying for those ads, that's kind of all they care about insofar as how you do on their platform. [00:04:00] They just want to keep us around so that you and I will continue to pay them money to show our products to people. And then additionally, Amazon also gets to double dip if someone buys our books.
And they get a little cut. But here's the thing, it doesn't actually matter if that person buys our book or something else. In fact, most products on Amazon are more expensive than, say, an e book. So it benefits Amazon when people click on one of our ads, Buy, or don't buy our book, but then buy something more expensive and continue to spend time on their website where they are then served more ads that they may click, at which point we, the advertisers, pay Amazon again.
Hearing it described this way may make you feel cynical and sure. I have notes on how this sucks for authors. But this is the game. And we can decide to play it or not. I've decided to play it on Amazon. And it's helped me get the results I want for my fiction career. So I [00:05:00] continue to decide to play it.
We can choose it, or we can not choose it. But two things are important here. One is that we understand how it works. And that our interests are not fully aligned with the platforms we're using. And, two, that we do have a choice. It's important to remember that. When we decide to play the game Amazon or Facebook or BookBub or Google or whoever else sets out for us, it's crucial that we understand that we are not in control of most of it.
We are the visiting team here, and the platform will always have home field advantage. They can even change the rules in the middle of the match, and they often do.
Facebook and Amazon are always tweaking the rules for their ads and the algorithms that determine which ad gets delivered to whom and how many times, et cetera. These variables are always changing and sometimes that benefits us and sometimes [00:06:00] it eats up our money with no results. The skill in working with ads is to know when to hold them and.
To know when to fold them. But this is a skill that nobody has mastered. So that's important to understand, too. It's not about mastery. It's about having a slightly better batting average over time. And if you know about batting averages, sorry about all the sports analogies, y'all. I don't know what to say.
It's a game, you know? Um, but, you know, if you know about batting averages, you know that they tend to include more failure than success. Like no one is batting a 500 over the course of a season and is not too different with ads. Now, every now and then, an ad will come along that just fucking works, like, oh, holy shit, this is printing money.
I had one of those on BookBub years ago. Every time I ran it, I would get like a 500 percent ROI, or basically get my money back five times of [00:07:00] what I put in. I was careful not to overwork the ad. So I pumped money into it one day a week for a while, and those, those were wonderful months. You can guess what happened though, right?
That's right, it stopped working. And I had the data to show that it was slowly declining and then just kind of stopped working. I didn't want it to stop working, and so for a while I fell into denial about it. It was, this time it'll work better, maybe if I just change the target? Nope, it was done. The end of an ad era.
We hear stories about ads like this all the time when we're in this industry. They're things of myth and legend. I will take a little bit of credit for the image and text on that BookBub ad being really, really hooky because I guess my ego needs that. But most of it was just the conditions of the ad platform being [00:08:00] perfect for that ad in that moment.
And then the conditions changed. And it was time for me to move on. In other words, most of the success of that ad was just luck. It's very unflattering to admit it, but that is often the case. It's crucial to our decision making abilities that we understand how each person who finds an ad or ads that work really well has sunk an absolute shit ton of money into ads that didn't work.
If we fall into thinking that this isn't the case, That people strike gold their first time. Then we're unlikely to push through the shitty ads to get to the one that works. And you know, sometimes ads just don't work. They just don't. I alluded to it before, but ads work for a little while for some books.
That seems to be the most reasonable approach that I've found, and that's from my own experience in [00:09:00] talking to other people. So, for instance, Amazon ads sold the shit out of my Jessica Christ series back in like 2017, 2018, but those ads just don't do jack shit for that series now. I cannot get those running to save my life.
maybe I need a cover refresh. I probably need a sales page refresh. And maybe I need a whole new pass those books to update them before the ads will start to work again for me. But, I also don't know that. And since there is only one of me, and so low businesses run on trade offs, do I really want to invest all that effort into a series without knowing that it'll sell more after?
Do I want to take attention away from my cozies that are selling well and working with the ads to bet on an old series? For now, the answer is no. And that could change with new information, but for now it's a no for [00:10:00] me.
Accepting that ads have stopped working for that series was a painful process. Jessica Christ is a series that I put a lot of myself in, and I still think it's culturally relevant. Maybe more so lately than before, so. I, like, really wanted it to sell. I can witness that emotion in myself, validate it, I mean, yeah, it's a valid emotion, and still decide that now is not the time to pour good money after bad.
Sometimes when ads stop working, it's simply time to practice acceptance and just move on. Right? We don't usually associate these sorts of things with something like ads, you know, these practices of acceptance and all the soft skills, as they used to call them. , But it's true, learning to accept it, rather than trying to force an ad platform to bend to your will is very likely going to keep you from lighting [00:11:00] your entire marketing budget on fire.
Now, did I stop running ads to Jessica Christ completely when they weren't really working? No, I lowered the budget significantly, because the ROI on that series is is only like 25 percent and the ROI on another series I have is closer to like three or four hundred percent depending on the month. So where should I put my money to maximize profit?
Kind of a no brainer. But I respect that there's a part of me that still wants the occasional reader to find Jessica Christ. And so I had to decide how much money my business could set aside for that emotional indulgence. Because emotions, you can't really just cut them out and expect everything to work fine.
We still want to build our emotional needs into our business. So, hmm, how much? How much money could I set aside for that emotional indulgence? To just know that maybe one of these ads would find a new reader and occasionally, you know, I sell some copies of [00:12:00] this series and I know that somebody's reading it, I see the read through because my sales are so low on it that I can tell when people are reading through.
It turns out it, the budget is like 25 a month. That's how much I'm going to spend on this.
Also, and this is just a tactical note, that may not be relevant by the time you listen to this episode. That's why I'm not giving a whole lot of tactical advice here, because it changes so frequently. But if you're running Amazon ads, I would highly recommend that you keep at least one small ad running on your books.
, you know, if you can just lower the budget on the ads that are existing that aren't complete duds, That's what I would recommend. And I understand from my own experience that it's tempting to stop all your ads, just burn the whole thing to the ground because it's not performing like it used to. But it can be really hard to get any ads running again, even close to whatever, you know, sort of pittance you're experiencing right now if you do that.
So maybe just lower the budgets. [00:13:00] On certain books for a while, but if you can afford to keep putting a little bit a month toward the ads you might wanna do, so keep tinkering with them, but do it on a low budget. So I'm not speaking from any insider knowledge directly from Amazon Here I'm working with what I've seen happen to authors who shut off all their ads, either because they didn't wanna think about Amazon ads anymore or because someone who.
Didn't know what they were talking about told them to so that's Actually the only tactical advice I'm gonna give and I only give it because I do want to spare folks the pain of trying to Get ads working again after shutting them all down. There can be huge regret on the other side of it So just something to consider let's focus for a moment on the sentence.
My ads have stopped working What does this mean for you? When I hear someone say this, I hear a lot of emotion, particularly frustration and fear, behind that sentence. So, I think it can be useful to invite our [00:14:00] thinking center into the conversation more. What is your threshold for not working? How do you define that?
Is it that your ads are spending more than they make? How much? Are you sure of that? Is the data you're basing that on reliable? Because ad dashboards, and this is the really frustrating part, but ad dashboards are not known for super reliable data, y'all. A lot of times they're just guessing too. So have you actually run the numbers on your ad spend versus your sales, or are you just going on vibes?
Even if you're not good with numbers, or you're not an analytical person, you can add up your ad spend for a book or series and then look at your royalties for that book or series in a similar time frame to see if you're making or losing money on it. You don't have to get deep into the data, but if you feel like your ads have stopped working, but you haven't yet taken the step [00:15:00] towards confirming that, I guarantee you're operating on fear and frustration, not reality.
The fear and the frustration might match up with the reality once you run the numbers, but that is little more than a coincidence. So we want to get as clear a picture of reality as possible when we're making business decisions.
We can certainly take our emotions, intuition, and beliefs into account in our decisions. But it's important to have clarity on what is what right if we're mislabeling emotions or intuitions as cold hard fact and data You know numerical data, then we can get into trouble. So know what's what and then we work from there Often though I see authors skip over running the numbers even at that most high level of revenue minus expenses because They're afraid of what they'll find, and they'd rather live in a fantasy where they can feel profitable than being confronted with a [00:16:00] reality where they aren't.
But only when we face the reality, even if it's not what we want it to be, can we start making informed decisions that will help us nudge our reality closer to our desired goal. So, you tell me your ads have stopped working. I ask you to define working, right? Do you have an answer? Is it that your ads need to be profitable?
Okay, fair enough. Here are some further considerations. How far away are your ads from being profitable? Do you have the available resources to keep experimenting until something meets your definition of working? When was the last time you did some intentional learning about the platform? Are you due for a refresh?
Do you have a friend who's doing well on the platform who would be willing to hop on a call with you for 30 minutes and give you another set of eyes on things? With each of these questions, we're inviting our thinking center [00:17:00] into the situation to approach with curiosity. That helps us have a clearer assessment independent of our emotions.
Our emotions are welcome to be part of the discussion, but they shouldn't put on the critical thinking name tag.
Frankly, a lot of times when people say my ads aren't working, what I hear behind that is something like, I'm sick of running ads and I don't want to do this anymore. You might be sick of running ads simply because it's Triggering a fear or unpleasant memory inside of you. So people who felt insecure in their math classes when they were younger, generally, made to feel insecure by teachers or parents, they often have an emotional or visceral repulsion to opening up a dashboard full of numbers.
And this makes total sense. I get it. There's, it is what it is, you know, if that happened to you, first of all, sorry. Wish you had better teachers. , but it makes [00:18:00] sense. If this is you, you're done alone in this by any means. But the question I would ask is whether you've concluded your ads aren't working so that you no longer have to suffer through that feeling, or if your ads are actually working really poorly based on the data.
Because if you simply no longer want to feel that fear, sadness, or disgust associated with being bombarded by numbers, then there are other options. You can pay someone to run your ads. And now sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't, depending on the person. and their fee, and your books, but it might be worth a shot for a few months to try it out.
Ask your author friends for referrals, start sniffing around for it. If it works, if your ads start taking off, fantastic, awesome, problem solved. If it doesn't, at least you can cross it off your list. And you may see some benefits in the end. If you were thinking of [00:19:00] shutting it all down anyway, What have you got to lose besides a little bit of money?
So chalk it up as tuition because you learned something important from that money spent.
If we know that we have a sensitive fear response, and if this is you, no need to feel any way about it because you probably developed it when you were still in diapers, so it is what it is. But if you notice it, then we can do ourselves a huge favor by bringing awareness to the fact when dealing with ads.
The efficacy of ads on any platform ebbs and flows. If we have a habit of projecting whatever is happening right now onto the future indefinitely, then we will be on a wild ride with ads. So this is a need for certainty. So we take whatever is happening in the Present, and project it forward. If it's good, the future looks bright.
If it's bad, not so bright. So, when the ads are hot and selling books well, we might project into the future that it will always be like this. [00:20:00] Despite, you know, maybe that nagging dread many of us have that good things can't last and we will spend accordingly. So, I've made 11, 000 this month up from 10, 000 last month.
So I can start planning on making at least 11, 000 a month from here on out. That's kind of what it sounds like. I really wish this was how it worked. Wouldn't that be nice? And we've probably all fallen into this fallacy before. But then something changes with the ads. Sales start to dip. If you have a sensitive fear response, and if you're checking your stats regularly, this might be where you freak the fuck out.
Even if you don't take immediate action, you might feel your heart rate increase and get a little sweaty and distracted. So if you can Pause and notice this reaction, then remember what I told you, and that I told you this is likely going to happen. This fear response can simply be viewed as a biological process that happens.
You don't actually need to make decisions [00:21:00] based on it. So pause, take a few deep breaths and bring that thinking center back online if you can. So here are some questions to look at. If you start to see the sales and the ads dip, have you experienced a similar dip before? Was it around the same time of year?
Were you doing other promotions in the previous months that you have not done this month that might explain the dip? Are other authors who use this platform experiencing something similar? Do you have the cushion in your finances for this unexpected dip? What might you need to adjust to make a cushion without stopping the ads completely?
Most of the time, and I really mean all of the time, but I'll say most of the time to leave room for the exception finders. Most of the time, the best thing you can do when you check your ads and see that they're dipping, and that your sales are dipping, and oh god, everything is crashing down. is to stand up from your computer and walk [00:22:00] away.
Maybe even go for a walk. There are two reasons I say this. The first is that you will feel better about the situation if you do that. The second is that almost nothing you do in a panic when it comes to ads is super effective. Also, there might not be anything within your control in that moment that will change what is happening.
At least not in a positive way. If you are adjusting ads in a state of high anxiety or panic, you're not actually trying to fix your ads, you're trying to convince yourself that you have control over the situation. Those are not the same thing. You're feeling out of control, and you're trying to exert control to feel better.
So yeah, that's not the same thing as making smart business decisions. So get up, go for a walk, maybe start asking yourself some of the questions we talked about through this episode as you do that. Okay, now what [00:23:00] if you do all the things and reach the conclusion that ads are not doing for your business what you want them to do, not even close?
What now? Well, you can stop running them for now. That's an option too. Take a break, go inhale some fresh air or watch a TV show that everyone keeps pushing on you, but you haven't had the time to enjoy, go spend some time with your kids or pets, text a friend to see what's new, basically get on with your life for a bit.
Try something fresh for your marketing. Maybe TikTok, contributing to an anthology in your genre, submitting your books to promo lists like bargain books here for a book bub feature deal. Start writing a new series just for the fun of it. Let ads go for a while. Shift your attention towards things that you have a little more control over.
You may find that after a while you want to give particular ad platforms another try. And maybe by then the algorithms will have shifted and you'll have more success. Who [00:24:00] knows?
I started off the show by saying that most six and seven figure authors run ads. So am I telling you that if ads stop working for you and you take a break from them, you won't be a six or seven figure author? I mean, kinda, yeah, sure. It's possible. Likely that your royalties will go down if you stop running ads, but so will your spending, and maybe that's okay temporarily.
If the ads weren't working, then they weren't working. If you can't change them, then you can't change them. So the choice you have is to be miserable about that, or go enjoy what else life has to offer. It doesn't have to be forever, but sometimes we need to shift away from the blocks in our career.
put our attention elsewhere, and then sometimes things we discover when we're doing that either help us return to the problem with new insight that solves it, or those things make us not care as much about the problem to begin with, [00:25:00] and then it stops being a problem. So if you're asking, what if my ads stop working?
I'll start by asking you to define working. Have you checked that against data yet? Are you willing to keep fiddling with them or simply wait to see if they start working again on their own? Can you lower the budget for a while? Is the issue actually that you don't want to run ads anymore? And maybe you could benefit from handing them over to someone else for a while.
And if you decide to stop running ads, I'd say that it doesn't have to be forever. There are other ways to sell books and grow an audience in the meantime. Being a sustainable author means developing the ability to stay anchored during the frequent Ups and downs of sales. So this might just be a downtime, but it doesn't mean there's nothing in your power to keep your author career afloat until the next big wave comes [00:26:00] along.
Shift your attention away from ads to other opportunities that might keep you connected to the community and readers, or to things outside of your writing life that are wonderful too. And then, if you're ready later, catch up on the latest best practices, and you can give ads another try.
That's it for this episode of What If for Authors. I'm Claire Taylor, and I'm just so glad you tuned in. If you don't mind leaving a review for the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It helps a lot. So thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me next time.
Happy writing!