Matthew J Holmes

With 5 books published, I've taken my wife's royalties from $100 per month to $15,000 per month. Yes, the Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads played a role, but it's the book product itself where the magic happens. Here's the 5 steps I've followed to increase book sales:

Not knowing how your course can be better is holding you back. Here, @MatthewJHolmes1 is getting a first peek at his course breakdown. "Aha" moments like these are my favorite part of my client meetings. Better builds bigger.

We’re honored to announce Matthew J. Holmes as a return sponsor this year featuring THE MATTHEW J. HOLMES AWARD FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL: Facebook Ads for Authors Course awarded to the first-place winner in 2024 Fantasy category. Learn more: buff.ly/44s9ABO

@ReaderViews @MatthewJHolmes1 Congratulations, Matthew J. Holmes! Thrilled to have you back as a sponsor. The Matthew J. Holmes Award for Best Fantasy Novel, featuring the Facebook Ads for Authors Course prize, is an exciting addition. Thank you for supporting fantasy literature and aspiring authors! 📚✨

@jonbrosio @craigshoemaker 100% Jon.

@MatthewJHolmes1 @craigshoemaker @craigshoemaker is the best. Full stop.

I've recently started working with @craigshoemaker to help me with the positioning, the messaging, and the content of my online courses (Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors and The Direct Sales Blueprint For Authors). It's been an eye-opening experience, I've had so many ah-ah moments and I have much more clarity around how I can best serve my audience with my content. We're still working together and will be for the next few months. The process Craig has walked me through is incredible, and I'm excited about the next steps. The attention to detail Craig pays to every aspect of the offer, the story, the positioning, etc, is incredible. If you have an online course that performs well, but you know, deep down like I did, that it could be better, I would highly encourage you to get in touch with Craig. I cannot recommend him enough. To top it off, he's an awesome guy, so friendly, down to earth, approachable and always has a smile on his face :) Thank you for everything, Craig.

Action takers get results. Matt didn't have to contact me. He didn't have to be willing to improve. He didn't have to act on my guidance. But... he did. Now, his courses are moving from good to great. Because Matt knows the value of taking action. Be like Matt.

@craigshoemaker You are so welcome, Craig. It’s been such a pleasure working with you, and an eye opening experience. Thank you so much for everything 🙏

@MatthewJHolmes1 I can't thank YOU enough Matt! Your program is *amazing* and I am honored to play a small part in making it even better. Here's to some amazing launches to come! 🍾🙏🏼

It was an absolute pleasure and an honour to be invited into your podcast, Ellie. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much 🙏

What do you do when you lose your entire business overnight? You turn your lovely wife's books into six-figure-business of course and help others do the same. @MatthewJHolmes1 offers so much wonderful advice in this episode. You can listen at elliebarkerwrites.com x

Self-Published Authors: If you're looking for guaranteed results and consistent performance in advertising, Facebook Ads isn't for you. No matter how much you spend, results aren't guaranteed. There are zero advertising platforms where results are guaranteed (assuming, by results, we're referring to sales). Even the best of the best advertisers can't guarantee results. Why? Because there is so much outside of an advertiser's control: Market Conditions Weather (yep, this affects sales) Other Advertisers Ads and Spend The Economy (National and Global) You're going to have good days. You're going to have bad days. You may even have bad weeks. And that's ok. Providing things are going in the direction you want them to go, you're all good. Looking at the day-to-day performance in isolation isn't helpful. On top of that, consistently refreshing your KDP dashboard, Shopify Dashboard, etc, multiple times per day, will do nothing for your mindset. Focus on what you can control and let go of everything you can't control. And things will start falling into place for you.

"Don't use Advantage+ Audiences with your Facebook Ads." Somewhat controversial, yes. But I've been doing a lot of testing with Advantage+ Audiences over the past few months, so I have some solid data to work with And, although Advantage+ Audiences may perform well in the beginning, it's got a pretty short shelf life. The reason being that it's targeting middle-of-funnel (warm) and bottom-of-funnel (hot) audiences. This is the low-hanging fruit for the Facebook algorithm. I thought Advantage+ Audiences were amazing in the beginning, as they got traction within a couple of days. With Unrestricted Targeting (location, gender and age), it takes anywhere from 3-7 days, typically. But after 6-7 weeks, the Advantage+ Audience Ads I was running got steadily worse: Higher CPM's (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) Lower CTRs (Click-Through Rate) Higher CPCs (Cost Per Click) Higher Cost Per Sale Higher Frequency The issue is, because Advantage+ Audiences are focused on the warmer audiences, it soon runs out of people to show your Ads to. Therefore, the same people continue to see the same Ads, which drives up the frequency, making the Ads harder to scale. Unrestricted Targeting, on the other hand, which is where you target location, gender and age only, is much more focused on targeting top-of-funnel (cold) audiences. This results in audiences being vastly bigger than the audiences Advantage+ targets. "But Matt, I thought you said each Ad creates its own audience." And you're right, it does. But some people within that audience will be warmer than others, and that's where Advantage+ Audiences seem to focus. It's a cheaper audience and can deliver quicker results. The problem is, you'll have a bunch of Ads that are targeting smaller, warmer audiences, rather than bigger, colder audiences. Another thing that can happen with Advantage+ Audiences is that you'll get lots of engagement on your Ads, but very few sales. So, in conclusion, my advice would be to stay away from Advantage+ Audiences. Stick to Unrestricted Targeting. (Location, Age and Gender) by selecting "Switch to original audience options".

"I've run out of ideas to test with my Facebook Ads". This was me just a few months back. But I now have a process to make sure I have a steady stream of ideas coming to me. This process I run through also helps me craft better Ads. Anyway, I digress... Last week, I was researching other Ads inside the Facebook Ads Library (part of my process), when I came across an Ad that had it all backwards. The Primary Text and the Headline were captivating and made me want to click. But the image was far from that. It was a generic image of a forest. What was being advertised? A book. I'm not saying you need to put an image of a book into your image; strangely enough, I often find that images without books work better. But there wasn't even any text in the image. When 80% of the success of a Facebook Ad comes down to the image (or video), I'd have been amazed if the advertiser was getting any traction with this Ad. The image (or video) is where your stopping power is. The power to stop the scroll. When an average social media user scrolls the height of The Eifel Tower each day, an image of a forest just isn't going to cut it. On top of that, your image (or video) has one more critically important role: Call out your ideal audience As a simple example, rather than using "Best Book I've Ever Read" as a review quote in your image. Look for a review quote that mentions your genre, such as "Best Fantasy Series I've Read In A Long Time". Just that subtle switch could make all the difference because you're calling out fantasy readers in this example. Not just any book in any genre! And because your Ads create their own audience, using words that are related to your books in your images, videos, etc, will help the algorithm find your ideal audience. You could have an amazing image, and beautifully crafted text on that image, but if it's speaking to the wrong audience, that Ad is going to be next to useless in most cases. If your Ads are attracting the wrong audience, sure, this audience might engage with the Ad and click on it, so the Ads get some good CPC (Cost Per Click) and CTR (Click Through Rate) metrics. But when these folks land on your book product page, what are the chances of them actually buying your book? The moral of the story... Focus on creating images (or videos) that speak to and call out your ideal audience FIRST, before you work on writing the Primary Text and the Headline for your Ads.

I've been advertising books with Facebook Ads for almost 4 years. The most important part of my Facebook Ads Strategy: Advantage Campaign Budget This allows Meta (Facebook) to decide which Ad Sets within the Campaign to spend your money on. The "traditional" way to set your daily budget is at the Ad Set level. But when you do this, you're forcing budget into Ads that may be terrible, and you can lose a lot of money. With Advantage Campaign Budget, each Ad needs to "earn" spend. Meta determines which Ads deserve spend based on their engagement (views, likes, comments, etc.) and performance (clicks, sales, leads, etc.). What's happening though if an Ad is earning spend, but it's either: - Costing a LOT to generate a sale OR - Generating ZERO sales If an Ad is earning spend, it's clearly doing a fantastic job at attracting attention and getting eyeballs on your offer. But with each Ad creating its own audience, the Ad is either: - Attracting the WRONG audience OR - People clicking on the Ad have no idea you're selling a book OR - There's a disconnect between the Ad content and the information on your book product page So, the key is to craft Ads that speak to your ideal reader and create product pages that fulfil your ideal reader's desire. Easier said than done, but with consistent testing (using Dynamic Creative), it's very possible. And for context, out of every Ad I create, I see around a 10% - 15% success rate. So don't expect every Ad you create to be a home run; most of them will flop, but that's ok. You only need a handful to scale up and turn Facebook Ads into a book sales machine.

Running an author business can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Inaction creates more inaction. Action creates more action. I've been in the position of wearing too many hats in the business; it just led to burnout and frustration. So for me, simplicity wins every time. And that simplicity rolls into the Facebook Ads too: - One Campaign - Unrestricted Targeting - Dynamic Creative Testing Facebook is handling all the technical stuff, allowing me to focus on what truly moves the needle: The Ads Coming back to inaction creates more inaction. Action creates more action. If you've found your Facebook Ads plateauing, like I have many times before, for me, the reason for the plateaus came back to not testing enough new Ads. And because I was stuck in the loop of inaction (not creating new Ads), it just led to more inaction of not creating new Ads. When I switched things up and took action (creating new Ads on a weekly basis), that created even more action, and I researched and launched new Ads every single week. It almost became a habit. When inaction was my default, I was cautious about testing new Ads because I saw Ad Spend as an expense, whereas now I see it as an investment. Today, I'm quite happy to spend money testing Ads because the data is invaluable. Every penny I spend today on Ads is worth so much more in 1, 2, 3 months time because I know what works and what doesn't work. Another benefit to taking action... confidence. You will build up a wealth of confidence, knowledge, experience and skills in whatever you put your mind to in life, including Facebook Ads. So, if your Facebook Ads are struggling to scale or even struggling to get traction, ask yourself, are you taking enough action? Oftentimes, it's taking action that holds us back because we're afraid of the unknown. If this is you, here's something that has helped me; Amazing things happen when you step outside your comfort zone.

In the past, News Feed only has performed best for me. But over the past few months, as I’ve been testing Advantage+ Placements, I’m seeing this perform better than News Feed only, even for Traffic Campaigns. I’ve always used Advantage+ Placements for Sales Campaigns, but recently, it’s been working well for Traffic Campaigns too. Even though 90% (or more) of the impressions and clicks (and Purchases for the Sales Campaigns) are on the FB News Feed, by using Advantage+ Placements, I’m seeing better performance, cheaper clicks, cheaper CPMs, higher CTRs,etc. I believe this is because we’re just getting out of FB’s way when we use Advantage+ Placements, and just letting the algorithm do its thing. Hope this helps, Caleb.

@MatthewJHolmes1 Why do you suggest using Advantage + placements?

If you're an author advertising your books with Facebook Ads, read this... Facebook Ads are now less about the technical and more about the strategy. Even 18-24 months ago, Detailed Targeting was where most advertisers focused (myself included). But fast forward to today and you'll see little to no long-term progress or scalability by testing Detailed Targeting audiences. In fact, as I'm sure you've noticed, Meta are now hiding Detailed Targeting audiences; they don't want you to use them. Meta wants you to use Advantage+ Audiences (not something I recommend based on all my testing so far; I suggest sticking to Unrestricted Targeting; Location, Age and Gender). Advantage+ Audiences and Unrestricted Targeting work similarly, in that they rely on the algorithm, AI and machine learning to find your audience. I've just found that Unrestricted Targeting allows for stronger, long-term results and scalability because it targets a colder audience. Whereas Advantage+ Audiences tend to focus on warmer audiences. It's the same with Placements; Meta wants you to use Advantage+ Placements (this is something I do recommend using). So, with all this technical stuff (technical term) being handled by Meta, where do you focus your time as an advertiser? On the biggest lever you can pull: The Ad Creative Meta are now doing all the heavy lifting for you. Your job is to simply craft Ads. Now, this is no mean feat, by any means. Finding high-performing Ads is hard, and it's going to take a lot of testing. But providing you're: - Doing the research - Focusing on the image/video (biggest impact) - Calling out your ideal audience (readers) in your Ads You can't go far wrong. And keep in mind that most of your Ads will flop. But that's ok because you only need 1-3 Ads to scale as high as you want to scale. You don't need to run 100's of Ads to succeed. You got this.

Thank you so much :) For me, it comes down to what your goals are (short term long term) and setting your expectations up front. We started running FB Ads for Lori’s books with one book out. Yes, Book 2 was released the following month, and a side novel (that barely sells) the month after that. So, we had just 2 books out for about 12 months, and we were profitable with that. It’s going to depend on if and when your next book is coming out, and how long you can sustain Ad Spend for. Also, do you want to build up an audience of readers before Book 2 comes out? You could get people into Book 1, offer them some sort of reader magnet to get them to join your email list, build up a following on Amazon (with your Amazon Author Page), and start building up hype for Book 2. Then when it launches, you’ll have a hungry audience of readers waiting for it. But, if profit is your goal, even if it’s only small, or breaking even, from the beginning, truth be told, it’s going to be tricky, but not impossible, in the beginning to do that with one book. Another advantage to running FB Ads though, is that you’ll build up confidence and experience running FB Ads. You’ll have a good idea of the Ads that work and the Ads that don’t. Hope this gives you some food for thought :)

@MatthewJHolmes1 I've just bought your book about Facebook ads and also watched your YouTube video. I'm probably going to get your masterclass course at some point but I have a question. Is it worth running ads if I only have one book? I'm working on a series but only have 1 atm

Great video, thanks for sharing 👍

Many self-published authors are struggling to maximize the power of Facebook Ads. But what if I told you Unrestricted Targeting is the key to more sales, better Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and an ever-growing community of loyal readers? Let's dive in... Running Facebook Ads as a self-published author can seem like an enticing way to promote your books, grow an audience of loyal readers and earn a full-time income as an author. And it's very possible, believe me. However, many authors are still running Facebook Ads like it's 2018. Times have changed. While Facebook Ads have the potential to reach, potentially, millions of readers, if you're still testing different audiences (Detailed Targeting), your results are going to be... Disappointing. And cost you a lot of $$$. Back in 2020, when I started using Facebook Ads to advertise my wife's books, I was, there's no better word for it, obsessed, with testing audiences. And it worked, for a time. Then, at the end of 2022, everything changed. Our results dropped off a cliff: - Royalties Dropped - Profitability Dropped - Bestseller Ranks Dropped It was all heading in the wrong direction. We went from earning $15,000+ per month in royalties, with a 3x Return on Ad Spend, to less than $8,000 per month in royalties, with a 1.5x Return on Ad Spend. It was bad. I tried everything I could think of: - Retargeting - More Budget - Custom Audiences - Lookalike Audiences - New Audiences (obviously) The three things I didn't test at the time: - New Ads - Unrestricted Targeting - Advantage Campaign Budget Since January of 2023 though, I've only been using the 3 things listed above. I've tested new Ads every single week, I haven't used a single Detailed Targeting Audience, and I now let Facebook decide where to spend my budget. And guess what... Our royalties shot back up to over $17,000 per month with a better Return on Ad Spend. Let's break this down a little further. New Ads Every single week, I launch 1-2 new Ads. But I do it in a way that lets Facebook do the heavy lifting for me, using Dynamic Creative. I provide Facebook with: - 3x Images - 2x Headlines - 2x Primary Text Facebook then mix and match these, creating 12 individual Ads from my ONE Dynamic Creative Ad. After a few days, Facebook may have found a winning combination of Image, Headline and Primary Text, and I just let it run. If it doesn't perform, I turn it off. The next week, I launch 1-2 new DCTs, testing new ideas or iterations of previously winning Ads, letting Facebook do the heavy lifting again. And so the process continues. Ads are the biggest lever you can pull, so I spend most of my time crafting new Ads, not clicking buttons in the Facebook Ads dashboard. Unrestricted Targeting This is perhaps the most controversial element of my strategy (especially back in 2023): - Zero Detailed Targeting - Zero Custom Audiences - Zero Lookalike Audiences The only targeting I use is: - Location - Gender - Age Nothing more. Nothing less. Why am I using Unrestricted Targeting? Because Detailed Targeting doesn't do the targeting. Your Ads create their own audiences. Your Ads do the targeting for you. When you layer on Detailed Targeting, you're throttling who, in the audience that your Ad has created, can be shown that Ad. Each individual Ad creates its own audience based on its content. Some Ads will reach a BIG audience. Some Ads will reach a SMALL audience. The key is figuring out how to create Ads that speak to and call out your ideal reader. Once you've got that nailed, your Ads are off to the races. Advantage Campaign Budget Historically, Advantage Campaign Budget was called Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). It's the same thing, with a different name. Advantage Campaign Budget puts Facebook in control of where it spends your money. You set the budget at the Campaign level, and Facebook distributes that budget across the Ad Sets within that Campaign. It decides which Ad Sets to spend your budget on based on their individual performance according to your Campaign Objective. The better an Ad is performing, the more engagement it is getting from people seeing it, the more budget it will receive. When you're setting the budget at the Ad Set level instead, you're forcing money into Ads that may or may not work. When using Advantage Campaign Budget though, you know that Facebook is only putting budget into the Ads that are actually driving results for you. Wrapping Up... Everything we've covered here is harnessing the true power of Facebook's algorithm, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. Leaning into this technology, not repelling it, is how you will grow and scale your author business with Facebook Ads. It also makes running Facebook Ads less time-consuming and very, very simple. I now spend just 1-2 hours per week running our Facebook Ads. And with so much time back, I can focus on what truly moves the needle with Facebook Ads: Creating Ads that convert people scrolling the Facebook Feed into lifelong, loyal readers. Simplicity scales. Complexity fails. Facebook Ads is a powerful platform with the right strategy. With an outdated strategy, it's a black hole for your bank account. If you want to learn more about how I run Facebook Ads and how 100's of authors I've shared this strategy with are running their Facebook Ads and transforming their author careers... I have a FREE mini-course on exactly that. It's called The Facebook Ads For Authors Masterclass. Oh, and I'll also send you daily(ish) emails on how to build a simple, lean, profitable 6-figure author business. Sound good? Learn more and sign up for FREE (link in bio).

@HobeckBooks Great to hear @HobeckBooks, thank you 😁Enjoy the course. You’ll master it 👍

I (the Beck) am having a CPD day today - doing the new Matt Holmes Facebook Ads course on Adrian’s laptop - it’s very informative - we’ve struggled with our Facebook marketing but we need to master this. @MatthewJHolmes1 #indiepub