Mal Cooper’s Facebook Ad Secrets That Make Authors Millions

Mallory Cooper, one of the legendary authors in the science fiction space and has helped literally hundreds and hundreds of authors make collectively millions of dollars by better marketing their books through Facebook ads. Mal has some incredible insights for us, and specifically like where Mal stands out to me just being incredibly insightful is the psychology lessons and insights into reader behavior. Like just understanding the reader journey from ad to then beginning a book and the principles of how you can actually encourage that and how you can drive more sales using ads. For those who maybe have never ran Facebook ads before, but have been curious about it, this is an amazing podcast episode for you. And even if you've been running Facebook ads for a long time, I think you're going to learn some tidbits here that you're going to walk away with and really help to improve your campaign. Especially because we're not talking about Facebook ads in yesteryear. We're talking specifically about how Facebook ads have changed and what this landscape means now in 2025 summer. So we'll definitely have to have Mal back on when there's another update to to the Facebook ads algorithms and how it all works. You can find Mal's links down below. Thank you all so much for listening. Mal, it is so amazing to be with you today. You're one of the legends in the indie publishing world that I've looked up to and Jill and I think it's gonna be very fun conversation because there's changes that have happened in Facebook ads this will cover, but I also want to revisit something that I think it was my favorite conference talk ever and you did it. So we're going to cover a few awesome things this episode today. But to kick it off for those who maybe don't know you, which I feel like most people in the community do, but for those who maybe don't know about your journey yet, maybe Share like how did you go from writing your first book to now? Like, I remember you on stage sharing your mission to write 400 books in the same universe. I know you're well over 100 titles.

Now, so I started I've been writing science fiction for about 20 years now, published for 13, and I've been full time for just shy of 10 years at this point. So it's been a pretty good ride. And I don't want to kind of. It's hard to summarize sometimes the whole journey, but it really was the big thing that really kicked it off for myself and my wife with our books. Once we had a few under our belt was Facebook Ads, we went from making like maybe two or $300 a month to making over $20,000 a month within three or four months. Once we kind of licked Facebook ads and figured out our audiences and whatnot. And you mentioned, like, how I do a lot of talking at conferences and whatnot. And that came about for me, seeing authors online, talking about Facebook ads don't work for them as far back as 2016 and me being. I think they do, actually, and wanting to help authors, either one of two things figure out, do Facebook ads work for you? And if not, stop doing them and focus on something else. And if so, here's how to make them be profitable for you. But I hate seeing people just waste money on things that aren't working. So that's kind of one of my big missions is to help people maximize their profitability in whatever they're doing. And over the years, it just became a bigger and bigger part of what I do. I've written about 128 fiction books now and had some pretty substantial burnout not too long after Covid also got Covid five times, which made creativity kind of hard transitioned a lot of the business over to helping authors. And that's probably our main source of income now, actually, is working with authors and helping authors, running ads for authors.

That's. What an arc. It's amazing. I remember first seeing you at a conference in 2019, but I followed some of your posts in some of the Facebook groups beforehand. I was like, oh, my God, there's the classic spaceship ass that you talked about. I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it. It was amazing. And I think for folks listening, that probably fall into three camps. There's folks who never ran Facebook ads, which, back when actually I saw you at the conference of 20 books, never ran Facebook ads before. Then I eventually progressed into the second camp, which is I ran Facebook ads. Didn't really get it to work for me. And then I eventually progressed in the third camp, where I got it to kind of work for me. I never got to really work. But what would you say for folks who are in the camp that they haven't done Facebook ads yet? Obviously, Facebook ads aren't for everyone, but they've been very useful for me. I think they can be very useful for many, many, many storytellers. How do you explain Facebook ads to someone who might be like, what are these? Because it feels really complicated and everyone seems to have a different take on how to describe, like, Facebook Ads101 back.

In the day to Harken way back to the early 2000 and tens, there weren't that many books on Amazon. And if you publish a new book, Amazon would promote it for you. And that slowly started to diminish because more and more books ended up on Amazon. And we're at a point now where every year to year and a half, the number of books in existence doubles. Yeah, this is the golden age of literature that we're in right now. The downside, of course that means that the competition is greater than ever before. For unlike something like the automotive industry, where by the time 2012 rolls around, pretty much all the 2010 cars are off the lot with books. Every book ever published is still available to read. Nothing ever really leaves the market. It's. There's more and more work involved in getting our books out there. One thing that is kind of nice is that the publishers like newness. So they do tend to promote new books a little bit more. So you get some boost out of publishing. But really what it comes right down to it, as authors, we're the ones that have to let readers know about our books. And we can do that a variety of ways. You know, we can do that with things that build our newsletters, we can do book pubs, we can do all sorts of paid promos, we can do in person events, or we can do advertising. One of the ways I explain it to people is that if you want to alert readers to the existence of your book, it's going to take time or money. At a certain point, if you're trying to grow your career early on in your career, you have tons of time, right? Because you're not, you're just working on getting your first book done. Maybe you have two or three books out and you're not managing a lot of readers. You don't have a lot of books in the pipeline. You're doing one book at a time, maybe two or three a year. You have tons of time to go to in person event and beat the streets and stuff like that. But later on maybe you're like hone your process. You have a couple different series going, maybe two pen names and now taking the time to do a lot of in person events and a lot of like conversations. Be in the streets takes away from important writing time that you could that only you can do. So at a certain point in a lot of writers careers it makes sense to say like time is a limited resource. If I can pay for something like Facebook ads or AMS ads or something like that, pay money to get my Books in front of people rather than spend time. That's a good trade because I can afford the money, I can't afford the time. Because really, when it comes down to, like, being an author and running your business, there's almost everything you can farm out to somebody else, except for the actual writing of the book. So you start making decisions about what gets money to solve a problem versus what continues to eat into your time that could be used to write a book.

Yeah, no, it makes total sense. And when you're doing something like Facebook ads, you don't need to start with a huge budget. Just $5 a day could be a great start for many folks. Let's say I got $5 a day, and I'm ready to give it to Mr. Zuck and see what happens. Facebook, especially, how you even set up campaigns and structures. Things have, over the years, lots of, you know, we always hear this is the new best way, and this is the new best way. Things sometimes do generally change the platform. So in 2025, I guess July is when we're recording. This will likely be released in July as well, or early August at the latest. So in the summer of 2025, what have you observed, especially working with not just your own books and titles, but obviously all the dozens and hundreds of authors you work with and writing wives? What have you observed as being like the best practices right now?

Facebook's making a really big push right now to get everybody to use their AI targeting for everything. And more and more, we're losing the ability to do our own detailed targeting, trying to pick who we want to see our books. It's conceivable even that within about 10 months or so, we might even lose the ability to even target by gender. And you can't even pick if you want your ad to show to men or women, or at least not definitively. You can suggest to Facebook that your ad may be better for men or women, but it's not even less like that. So it's really coming down to us having to get better and better at making really good creative, that is conveying genre, conveying tropes, conveying the intended audience really well to both the AI and to the people seeing the ad. Because it used to be that the ad creative was for the viewer, that was for the human looking at the ad. And then all the nuts and bolts stuff about audience selections and placements and all that was for the system, but now the AI does the targeting. It's basing a lot of who it shows our ad to. Based off the ad itself. And right now, it's an ongoing process as Facebook updates their AI and changes it and as what people consider to be a good ad, which also always changes. Those two things are both moving, and it always involves a lot of testing and analysis. And that's actually, I think, where most authors fall down the most is it's very hard for an author to tell unless it's an ad that either is terrible and does absolutely nothing or is going like crazy. Those ones people can spot pretty easily, but there's so many ads in the middle that could be profitable that people turn off or are losing money, but not too much money that they leave running forever. And those ads just soak up money. And really, this is the big thing for authors is one, learning how to make better creative, but two, really being careful about analyzing ads and watching them to make sure that you don't have ads that are just eating your money.

Yeah, you mentioned an ad that just can have in the background, making money forever. That does sound like the dream. But that does mean understanding what's making you money. So when you're running ads for their authors, not all the ads are going to be profitable. You're going to have some that are definitely profitable and some that are not. How do you determine that?

Guess why. I use Amazon Attribution links for every ad. It's a system they rolled out about three years ago for authors. Everybody but authors had it longer. We got it about three years ago. And so it's not a perfect system, Amazon Attribution, but it gives us sort of a bellwether as to whether or not an ad is doing or not. It misses a lot of the activity that comes as a result of clicking your ad, but it'll give you some impression of, like, how many reads you're getting and how many sales you're getting. And what I actually look for in a good ad is that it's getting at least 10 pages read per click. If an ad is getting 10 pages read per click and you have a series of at least three books, chances are that ad is breaking even. And if the series is longer or you can get a higher number, like 20 pages read per click, then you have a profitable ad. And there's a ton of math and logic behind all of that. I recently did a class called the Four Pillars of Facebook Ad Analysis. I realized I wanted a different way to teach it. And in that class, I really break down how I come up with that number and how you can either just go with that number or how you can do your own detailed analysis to see if your ads are optimal. What I. 9 times out of 10, all I'm looking for is the ad doing better. 10 pages read per click in KU. And then I started honing it, trying to get that number higher. And with some authors, we can get that number up to 50 or 60 pages right now, which means the ad is probably tripling its money at that point.

Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Okay, so then it becomes the type of thing where I love that you mentioned the goal is not necessarily to get the most clicks. It's to get the most page reads, to get the most people actually reading your story, which is a nuanced but super important point. So how do you create, like, if you're working with an author who, like, let's say, has a book cover and description, how do I create something that gets people to click, but also gets the right people to click? Is there a set of questions you ask yourself, or a process, or just even any general tips you have for folks who are trying to do just that?

I think one of the first things you have to do is sort of take a step back from your book and think of it as though it's a product that someone handed to you to advertise. And you only know what the COVID tells you and what the blurb tells you. So you take off your writer hat, put on your marketer hat, and just be like. Like, imagine if someone handed you a can of corn. You're like, okay, well, it's corn. It's tasty. Here's the nutrients that are listed on it. Here's the price, perhaps. Here's how big it is. You know, you're actually not going to open up a can of corn and make sure that it's actually corn. You're just going to sort of, like, trust that it's a good can of corn. It's going to taste yummy. And you operate from there as authors. A lot of times when we're marketing our own books, we're like, oh, but you know, I got that one song review that one time. Does it really have this trope? I'm not sure. Will people be convinced of it? The book is an amazing, amazing book. It's the best can of cream corn that's ever been put in your hands. It's going to change someone's life just to taste it and operate from that premise. Whenever I market someone's books, I always behave as though this book is an amazing read, and I promote it. That way, if you start from sort of a position of like, oh, it has all these flaws, which I know a lot of us think about when we think about works. You're gonna. It's gonna bleed into the kind of ad that you do. So that's where the first step is frame your activity in a way, your marketing activity in a way that you are so doing a job, you've been handed a thing and the product is amazing and kind of start from there. And then really, for a lot of authors, I can actually make really decent ads that can perform really well just off of their cover and their blurb also. One of the reasons too is a lot of authors actually bury the best part of their book. The most interesting part of their book is usually not in their blurb because they're all trying to be clever, you know, and like hold that thing back. And the example I give people all the time is there's a movie from back in the day called Devil's Advocate and stars Al Pacino. And Al Pacino, he's a lawyer, but he's actually also Satan. He is the devil. And so when all the trailers came out for this movie and everything, they just flat out you knew that Al Pacino was the devil. The trailer gave it away. You go into the movie knowing the Al Pacino is the devil. And the characters in the movie don't find out to like the last 10 minutes that they're actually like working for the devil or in a romantic relationship with Satan kind of thing. But it's that experience of you knowing and the characters not knowing that make it really interesting. So I always use that as an example. Like if they had just sort of like pimped this as like a movie about Alpa being a lawyer, some people would have gone to see it because he was huge at the time. Everybody loved Al Pacino, but it wouldn't have gone nearly as well because it would have just seemed like a regular movie and they would have had to make it seem like the movie's about one of the cases when really that's not what the movie was about. And so the most interesting aspect of the movie wouldn't have been in the trailer and they wouldn't have been able to push it the same way. I made that mistake with one of my books where it's all about a colony ship that's on this mission to get off to this one world. It's going to be a 200 year flight to get to the colony world and then they'll settle it and do whatever. The twist is that they never get there. Something happens and they end up 5,000 years in the future. And I didn't tell people that. I buried that. I tried to make it about the call, going to the colony and all that stuff. And I left out the most interesting part of the story, that they jump into the future. Everything's different when they get there. The world's already settled and all this other stuff goes down. And it made all of my advertising weaker because I was trying to make the ads about something that the story wasn't really about. The story is really about the fact they never get worth trying to go. Everything goes sideways on them. And even to the point where my book, the book was called Destiny Lost. And it was sort of like my subtle, like, I'm an artsy author thing going on. It's like, oh, they have this destiny and they're never going to get it. And the best performing ads I always had was where my headline on the ad said the Lost Colony Ship. And everybody would comment on the ad saying, I clicked on this ad for this Lost Colony ship book. And the book, I think it's the wrong book. I think you've linked to the wrong book. And I would say, like, oh, no, this is a story about how XYZ happened. And it's trying to explain to all these people. But it took me years to finally set my ego aside and be like, maybe I just need to retitle the book. So I actually retitled the book the Lost Colony Ship. And my sales went by 20% just by doing that one thing. And so that's the kind of thing I think that circle all the way back around. That's why sometimes I will sort of interrogate an author because their blurb is oftentimes missing the most interesting thing. Just yesterday, I was working with an author on her book. And it's about a man and woman who are on the team. People that recovers artifacts that were stolen and someone's been kidnapped. And so the team is actually switching and they're trying to rescue the guy. It's about this guy saying, I wouldn't normally do this, but he's the best man I've ever known. He's my best friend. I'm going to help him. But unfortunately his sister's on the team and she's a pain in my ass. And then of course, it's a romance novel as well. So then he's like, but I'm kind of into her at the same time. Really interesting. I was talking with the author and she's like, well, actually the woman that he's into is the mastermind who leads the team. That changes everything. That makes the book so much more interesting because now it's not some junior woman on the team that he sees as a tag along. She's running the team and he's having to sort of operate under her authority while also chafing against it. Like, that changes everything about how you perceive this book. And she left it out because she thought it was an interesting twist to the story when instead it was one of the most interesting marketing aspects of the story, I think, and made me immediately more interested in it, too.

Okay, no, this is like incredible insight. And I think the first point you made around having to set your emotions aside about the book, if you do do that. I know my immediate thought as a storyteller, because I've made this. I've done this before, Mal, where you have. You're burying the lead, right? But where's the line? And maybe there isn't one. But my instinct is like, oh, but that twist is so good, I want to save it. How do you know? Like, yeah, that twist is so good. Like, you should not tell them versus, like, you know what? Actually, that is deeper in the story and there's a little bit twist and that is revealed. But you should also share the information up front because it's going to bring the right people into the journey. How do you discern between the two?

I would just always err on the side of revealing the twist, to be honest.

No, that's great. That makes it easy. And then I'm seeing now, first of all, I'm so with you. It would be very hard for me to change the title of a book. It's like we get attached. I know. It's like whenever I think of it, for the most part, it's like you get the title, you know, and then you, you know, you. Obviously there's more to it than just the title, but the title is like something I start with and maybe sometimes I change during the draft. But like, you've spent a lot of time living your life being the title. But you mentioned, like, that headline, lost Colony ship was getting a lot more clicks. Now, here's maybe a broader question, which is have there been moments where you, and also, of course working with other authors have had creative variations, whether it's a specific image, primary text, or the headline, but you highlight something that you're like, I'm just going to give this a shot. And then it over Performs. Has that happened? And then have you decided to change the actual packaging of the book as a result of an ad? Is that a common thing?

I would say, like, maybe only about 5% of the time does that actually pan out well, 5% overall? Does the author actually do it? Because a lot of times we blend up with scenarios where we can have an ad that performs really, really well and the book doesn't convert as well as it should. So we can look at it be like, okay, so in the ad, I'm revealing the plot twist or using what I think is a better way to frame the book or a better trope to pull out of the book than what the COVID and the blurb do. And most of the time when we can see, like, okay, the ad worked really well and that the product paid for, the book doesn't convert. Unfortunately, most time, the author is too resistant to change the actual book. Only about 20% of the time do they actually change the book. A lot of authors, I'll say to them, like, huh, this confuses me in your blurb, or why does your blurb say this but your cover doesn't show it? Their default is to start explaining it to me. If you have to explain it to me, then you've already lost the reader because you're not there to explain it to every single reader who shows up on your page and has the same question. You just lose them as potential readers. It's like, big things like that are actually, like, these have to align. And when we do fix them, we actually, 90% of the time see, like, a measurable improvement in conversion by making those changes to get things more on.

Yeah, I mean, that makes total sense because I just know from my own behavior, it's sometimes easier to put yourself into the shoes of yourself buying another book or experiencing another story. And it's like, even just like, how many Hollywood trailers do you see that your sim just like, this is super confusing. And then the other extent where your sim is like, I'm so bought in now. This is amazing. So that makes total sense. Which on that point around trailers, which this notion that creative is now really much more important on Facebook when it comes to targeting, obviously you've got images that can be like, the core ass of the creative. Then you have videos. And I think videos over the last five years have been something that Facebook, especially with like, obviously reels and reels as well, there's more videos on the platform, I think, than ever. Is that something that you've seen, like, authors using video to Advertise themselves or images being the way to go, because obviously images are easier to make than video for the most part.

Facebook actually serves video to younger people at a much higher percentage rate than images to older people. So a lot of authors, they're like, oh, I can't seem to reach a younger audience with my ads. It's like, yeah, because you're using images and Facebook's not going to show those to young folks. You want to reach younger people, you have to show video. Also, people are like, no, my ads never seem to show on Instagram. It's because they're using images. You want your ads show on Instagram. They have to be video to really get presence on Instagram. So it's because. And that's part large part of that's the age difference. Instagram is much younger user base than Facebook. So you can actually play around with that with a lot of authors. What we'll do is we'll make still image ads, be like 40 to 65 plus. And then we'll make video ads that are like 20 to 55, the age range that we want to hit for them. And right now, for example, if you look at the way that when Facebook gives us audience size estimations, there are more women who read romance on Instagram than there are on Facebook. But they're only reachable by video. You cannot get them with just still images. So if you're just doing still images for your romance and your romance is written in such a fashion that would appeal to a younger reader, you're actually missing over 50% of the audience by not doing video. But if you're writing like 40 plus women's fiction stories, you might not see much at all by making video ads. They might, you might get a small bump, but the majority of your readership is going to respond better to image ads and they're going to be on Facebook.

Wow. Makes complete sense. And that's so interesting. Very tactical here. But I'm creating image ads. I know there's now like, there's a million ways you can get images online outside of just showing my cover, which we'll assume folks listening have. Where do you go to find images or procure images that could be great for ads?

Yeah, so there's a couple of like old standbys. There's deposit photos or Dreams time, chipin and istock. IStock's more expensive though, and they have the same pictures everybody else. I actually like using Adobe's stock image site because people use it a little bit less and it's got stuff that isn't as saturated. So it's just stocked on adobe.com and they've also got stock video and stock music. They have the best stock music searching tool. You can like choose by beat and by length and by style and by mood. So if you want to get your own licensed audio for video, there's actually even like songs with good lyrics that you can use. If you have like an ad that you think would actually be really good, you want like a down and dirty kind of like country western in a bar kind of vibe. There's music would match that you want like something symphonic for like a sci fi intro, music like that. So they got really good tools for that. So those, I use that a lot in the video side of things. They have an image search and they actually have a really good filter to exclude AI from the images as well. Because a lot of these platforms have been just like filled with AI now at this point. So you're like, I'm buying my image from deposit photos because I want to avoid AI. But Adobe is really good at actually discerning that because they create model profiles and have the releases and all that sort of thing for a lot of the stuff. So you can be a lot more certain that you're actually getting. I mean, there are some stuff that squeaks through, but by and large you could be really sure you're getting non AI stuff. But if I'm working with an author that's okay using AI, then I'll use, I'll use Midjourney. Put it together. Midjourney has been sort of my, my favorite over the years. Every now and then some other tool gets a little bit better than midjourney, but they're honestly the ones that can consistently give you the best results. And like I try to avoid using AI when I can because if I can find like an actual photo shoot, photo that's done well with good lighting and a real person, like 9 times out of 10 it's going to look better than AI still. But sometimes like you want to get like, I don't know, an Asian guy and a black woman or a man running through some particular square in Rome. You know, you're never going to find that in stock photos. You'd have to pay like hundreds of dollars per image to get that artist. So AI is sort of a way around that. It's a little bit tricky because some people are very much against AI and I'm, I'm against like the power it's giving corporations is actually one of my biggest concerns about AI, there's the whole creative sourcing angle of AI, but then there's also like, do we really want, like, corporations controlling creativity? Which is sort of a separate conversation. But at the same time, if you're a small business person, an author, and you're trying to actually sell your books and make a name for yourself, well, everybody that's huge that you're competing against is leveraging a lot of AI. So at a certain point, you decide, like, do I. How much do I hamstring myself? Where am I willing to draw this line? And a lot of people are okay with that line being an ad and running ads, because even when you're doing stock photos, the actual person who took the photo or the model is getting pennies at best. So you're not taking a ton of money out of someone's pocket when you're doing advertising images. Different story when we're talking about a book cover or something like that, Someone's losing a lot more than pennies in that case. But when it's coming to advertising images, no one was ever making a lot of money off of sourcing those images. So for a lot of people, they'll be okay with using AI for their ads versus what they might do for a cover or something like that. And the other thing too, is a lot of the cool AI tools. Now you can get a really cool image, and then you can animate it. So you got that guy running through that square, and boom, now he's running. Now he's actually running through the square. So the same image that you're still imaged ad becomes your real as well.

Exactly. Yeah. It's really important. I think you bring up a really good point. Wherever folks kind of are at with AI, I think we all can agree, the big corporations, it's very interesting times right now. I think there's great cause for concern around corporate monopolies and power, but it's just life. We live in a market. We have to compete with other books to be sold. Some decisions have to be made around what makes sense for the business. And sometimes people might be able to. Like you're saying you can do something that's great for the business and doesn't use AI and that could be great for someone. There's all these different options. But I love that you gave us a bunch of options, because I think that's really important for folks getting started. It's like, okay, well, great, I want to run ads, but how do I do it? So I want to now Shift gears a little bit, because this is connected to advertising deeply. But it's also connected to just, you know, copying your book description, which is. You did this talk. I believe it was at 20 books. 2021. 20 books. Two decades. 2021. And it was called Finding and Keeping Fans. You've done so many talks. Do you remember this talk?

Yep, I do remember that talk. That was one of my favorite talks that I ever gave.

It was one of my favorite I've ever listened to, just period. It was incredible. Words to use and words not to use. Talk to me more about that because whether it's advertising or the copy in your books, obviously words are really powerful. But I don't think we're always aware of the emotions that certain words evoke.

Yeah, like, there's a lot of words. There's words that just automatically have negative connotations. And like, there's some obvious ones, like disgust. If you're writing a romance novel and you put the word disgust in as, like, she was disgusted by him. There's words like moist. Like, apparently moist is one of the most unliked words in the English language. So there's words that are obvious that you wouldn't really want to use in your blurb or in your marketing because they're just going to set people off the wrong way a little bit. But there's other words that always have good connotations. People always like the internal meaning they have for these words. Words like join. No one dislikes the word join. It has a feeling of togetherness, of belonging, of having a place to be and someone welcoming you. So, yeah, in that talk, I get into a lot of detail. I even have examples, and it's still up on YouTube. You can look it up the 20 bunches.

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It was a good one. It also has, like, an iconic thing about me talking about I was wearing a latex dress and talking about being really sweaty and having to take off the shower. So it's. It has everything. It's got the jokes and everything, too. That talk. I walk through some examples of. Like, one of them was, here's an email that you might write about a meeting written with negative. It's called priming. It negatively primes the reader. And then here's how to write the same email in a way that positively primes the reader. And you could even imagine, like, you could have a book that's delayed and you could be like, the book wasn't able to come out on time due to some unforeseen factors in my life. I hope that you guys will be okay with that. You know, like, you're conveying this information, but you're framing it all negatively. And even though it's understandable why you might do so, people are going to walk away from that feeling. You guys all know how it can be when life can be a little bit topsy turvy. And that's kind of hit me lately, but it's given me the opportunity to spend a bit more time with the book, put some extra polish on it, and I'm really feeling good about that. When this book comes out, it's going to be the best it could have possibly been and you guys are going to love it and it's going to be well worth the wait. You can convey the exact same information, but you can frame it entirely differently. And one way makes people sort of feel almost like, oh, this book's going to be bad because this author's life is in the toilet and they clearly aren't going to have the time to spend on the book. And the other ones, you can be like, hey, some stuff happened, but I got to do an extra read through of the book. Obviously not lying, but you could frame things in a positive way to make people even more excited about the book, even though it's delayed. So I talk a bunch about that, about how you can use these words and frame things. And this can take your newsletter, your blurb, your ads, even the interior of your book itself. You can think about these words. And so those are the priming words. And I also talk about filter words. And filter words are really important to know as well. They're more okay to have them inside your book because you can get a lot of context around. But in ads in your blurb, you don't want to use them. And that could be a word like felt. You know, he felt that something was wrong. And so you've got that in your blurb for you, you might know why they felt something was wrong, but for the reader, they're going to be like, I don't know why they felt like that. And it actually pulls them out of the blurb. And now they're having to think about like, what did I just read? Is there any context in what I just read that would help me understand what would cause a person to feel this way and then proceed. His brow lowered, he blew out an angry breath. Because then now the reader can visualize the scene. They know the actual event that caused her to know this versus just saying she knew it so there's these filter words that you can avoid as well that make it so that people are pulled out of your writing less and they're more there with the characters experiencing everything. And those are important for both the writing and for the market. And that's all within that talk.

No, it's so important because we buy things based on emotion and we also keep staying with things based on emotion. And there is another interesting point that has stuck with me since I've watched it, like I've never forgotten it. It's all about, you know, with ads where trying to grow our fan base, obviously trying to reach more readers. Then the big question is like, how do we keep them there? And you mentioned, you know, longer series and all these things help, but that also means they have to keep reading through it and wanting more titles from you. And you've built this world now where you presumably had many, many readers read all hundred plus of your titles and thousands read dozens. I mean, that is tremendous. You don't just write 100 books and then have people read all of them. Like they have to want to keep wanting more. And you mentioned this notion of meta story.

Sure. It came out of the Theodora Taylor's idea and her book called Seven Figure Author about how there's what she called universal fantasy. Every book that we enjoy is sort of satisfying one of these universal fantasies. And I thought, well, if you're going to try and build something even bigger where you want to pull people into multiple series, they're all connected. You almost have to think beyond the universal fantasy in an individual book and think about what I termed as a meta story, where everything you write is actually kind of telling the same story or taking readers on a similar journey or part of a larger overarching journey. And you can have more than one meta story inside of side of a large series. One of my this works both as a meta story and a universal fantasy is like. For me, Found Family is one of my favorite storylines. You'll always suck me in with a Found Family storyline where someone who doesn't belong finds a place to belong and then moves on. I have that as one of my main storylines across everything I write. One of the big things that I'm writing and this was not as well thought out initially as it became eventually. But I really want to write about how humanity, we're in the opening era of it right now. We're creating our successor race, we're creating AI. And AI are going to be better, faster, stronger, more intelligent and better suited to survive. And thrive than we are. And there's going to come a point where it's going to be like, what? For what reason do humans even exist anymore? And I think that's going to be the existential struggle that humanity is going to fight with for some time in the future. And so a big part of my stories is all about how humanity and the successor race to humanity survive and get along with each other, and how perhaps rather than seeing things, we can see things as adversarial, or we can see things in a way that we can actually help each other or. Or where the AI can actually help humanity survive in ways that they wouldn't have survived and thrived otherwise. That's a meta story that's actually woven into everything that I write, so anybody who's interested in that kind of actually gets tidbits of that along the way.

Very clear to me what a meta story is. I think it is really powerful because it allows you to Genre still, of course, matters, but you can imagine a similar meta story existing in many different subgenres and potentially even overall genres as well, which I think is very freeing because for a lot of us, it's like, does every thing need to be a new pen name if you move into a new genre? And like, the answer is oftentimes, yeah, probably should be, or at least have some separation. But in your case, if you're having a similar meta story, you might not need to do that. There might be algorithmic benefits if it's like, still pretty divorced, but no, it makes makes so much sense. Well, I have just two final questions and sure, the next one is on beyond the Book podcast, and I know you've done many things beyond the book in terms of bringing your IP into different formats throughout the years, whether it's merch, soundtracks, games, et cetera. What has been one of the most favorite, maybe successful things you've done with your fans to bring your story into life in a slightly different light?

That's a good question. One of my ongoing really good sellers is a simple game I made called Snark. My characters are always playing it. There's always a game of Snark going on somewhere in one of the books because there's a lot of long interstellar voyages that they're on, so they're just sitting around playing Snark. I actually developed all the rules for Snark and then made decks of cards that people can get that. They come with like a rule sheet that explains how to play Snark, and they get a deck and the cool idea is I made it with the standard 52 card deck. So you can use this deck to play poker or whatever game you also want to play, or you can play snark with it. Because I wanted to make it like a cool collector thing, but also something that like, hey, you've got this deck of cards and you want to play whatever you can play with the cards that you got from me. I got 500 decks of cards, including the boxes and all the card art. Cost me about $5,500. It worked out to only like six bucks a deck, and I sell them for 15. I tripled my profit on these things. And I never even have to promote them. Just readers go to my website, see if they can buy a snark deck, and they're all just in on it. They all just buy snark for it. You know, I just can't sort of keep selling them. And it was really fun and really easy. And they even write me and tell me about the games they played, like, what happened and stuff like that. Like, oh, we were like, right here, and the cargo hold was stacked up with all these cards, and I managed to pull it off and, like, and get the captain's chair and do the whole thing. So.

Oh, my God.

It's actually a game that has individual rounds, and then each round builds on each other. There's an old game called President that I pulled some rules from, and then there's a couple. I can't remember the original games, but I took a bunch of different games, kind of merged things together, and then put it into a sci fi setting. Because I was also thinking, how would possibly these games evolve in the future to become a new kind of game that might actually exist in the future?

It's a present day. I love it. That's the best way to do something beyond the book is when it's very natural because it's already in your story, giving them a chance to experience it. Classic example. But lightsabers, I mean, it's hard to beat how great that is. Do you love Star Wars?

There's multiple lightsabers in this room.

I think they're awesome, right? Yeah, it's probably one of the best ones that comes to mind. And I know that I'm absolutely spinning because I feel like we've gotten a crash course in the Facebook ads, but I know there's still so much more to it. So where can we find you and Jill and the writing wives? And how do you help authors supercharge.

Everything they're doing so our main website is the Writing Wives, but we've shifted sort of away from that to a new site called storytellerlab.net if you go to thewritingwives.com it'll basically move you over there. Because we used to do, like, a lot of stuff, but the problem is it really didn't scale, and I had to keep hiring people. And then I became a manager of people and not a person helping authors. So we actually scaled everything back so that we don't need to have a staff anymore. We can just work directly with everybody we work with. And we ended up just taking everything that we've ever done, every course we've ever taught, and we refresh them yearly, and we have them on storyteller lab.net and it's $37 a month. And you get access to everything that's in my brain because I really. I wanted to make it more accessible, less expensive for people. And people can just tap into it and learn when they need to, and they don't feel like, oh, goodness, I paid 500 for this. Now it's more like, hey, come in. You want to learn about how to analyze ads? Or you want to learn an easy way to make reels, or take a crash course in using midjourney to make AI images. You can grab that thing, learn what you need to learn, and then it didn't cost you a ton of money to get that. You can come again later, get something else. One of the things we have is the best thing in there that just got updated a couple months ago is our beginner Facebook ad course that walks you through everything as it was. Things have changed slightly since then, but not too much. Everything as it wasn't about March. And you can get all the deets and learn how to make ads and learn how to analyze ads. And there's a community where you can ask questions. We actually have a really active community that's not on Facebook, which is kind of hard to do as well. So you can join in, ask questions. You'll get tons of people that will answer and weigh in with their thoughts and experiences.

Oh, that's so cool. What a great memberships. They'll be linked in the description. It's perfect. I love it. That's amazing. Mal, this has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

It's been a great time. Thanks.

And that's it for this episode of the beyond the Book podcast. One thing I want to mention is that you don't have to advertise just books through Facebook ads. Yes, we focused on books today, but literally all these same principles apply. Apply if you're creating movies and shows from your stories, which that might sound farcical. Okay, Michael, yeah, but my book's never going to be a turn into a movie. Except now it can't with Creatorwood. It's a platform that uses AI to turn your books into movies and shows, and you can then advertise those shows through Facebook ads. Charge per episode. It's amazing. So you should check out Craterwood. It's linked down in the description. You could join. Right now we're in beta, so you can join the beta and get started. And we'd love to have you there. If you have any questions about creative, let me know. And in the meantime, I hope everyone has an amazing rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.