My First Experience With Facebook Ads

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This is a description of my first—and perhaps last—experience with Facebook Ads. Had it worked well for me, that would have been great for getting the word out about my books, but I wouldn’t have had this tale to share with you. Epic failures always make the best stories.

Here’s the scene: my latest novel, just out. Relatively new Facebook author site. I made an ad announcing my new book. Facebook suggested an “investment” of $70 for one week of them “spreading the word.” According to my Facebook author page Professional Dashboard, I got for my money:

1,334 views (number of times my content was displayed)921 “reach” (I don’t understand how this differs from views)and 8 interactions (likes, shares, comments, etc.)

Let’s look at the eight interactions:

One was a content creator who offered to make a book trailer for me, which actually isn’t a bad idea. I’m seriously considering it. However, this person wanted me to pay them several hundred dollars per month for their book marketing services. They told me they highly value honesty and integrity (Run for the hills!) so I should understand it will probably take several months of my paying them several hundred dollars per month before I see any significant return on my “investment.” Considering that I earn ~$5 per paperback copy sold for $15.99 (yes, even self-published authors keep only a fraction of the book’s purchase price), I would need to sell hundreds of books per month just to break even. I don’t begrudge this person asking, but if I’m going to waste money, I should buy a boat and at least have some fun with it.Three wanted to “chat” with me, wink, wink. And perhaps more … Teresa didn’t think this was a good idea to pursue, for some reason.The rest were scammers who pretended to be from Facebook. They all claimed my Facebook author site violated some (unspecified) Facebook rules and that they would shut it down unless I clicked on a link to explain to them my “misdeeds.” Each one was subtly different, with a variety of names, Facebook departments, and threats. One that went to my email was from a Vietnamese email address. These were obvious phishing attempts, and I ignored them. And my author page is still up.

Number of people who asked anything about my books or expressed interest in buying one: ZERO!

Number of times Facebook has recommended I run another ad: MULTIPLE!