Solved: Low Organic Reach on Facebook for Author

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I read through your situation and it's an incredibly common one, so don't feel like you've done something uniquely wrong. The truth is, the way Meta (Facebook & Instagram) presents advertising to new users, especially with that tempting "Boost Post" button, is fundamentally misleading. You're right to feel like it's a bit of a con, because for your goals, it is. Your organic reach hasn't dropped because you're being "punished", but because the platform is designed to make you pay to reach your own audience. You haven't ruined anything, you've just been using the wrong tool for the job.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how to approach this differently. The short answer is you need to stop thinking about "boosting" and start thinking like a marketer with a proper strategy and a sales funnel. It sounds more complicated than it is, and I'll break it down for you.

Why You're Paying Facebook to Find Non-Customers

Let's tackle the biggest issue first: that "Boost Post" button. It's the single most common trap for small business owners and creators. When you press it, you're essentially telling Facebook's algorithm one thing: "Find me the largest number of people, for the lowest possible price, who will click the 'like' button or leave a comment."

The algorithm is incredibly good at its job. It goes out and finds exactly those people. The problem is, the users who are cheapest to reach—the ones whose attention isn't in high demand from other advertisers—are almost never the ones who are going to pull out their credit card and buy a book. They are serial "likers" and commenters. They enjoy engaging with content, but that's where their journey ends. This is precisely why you saw 500+ reactions but not a single new follower. You paid Facebook to find you 500 people who like to click a button, and it delivered perfectly. It's not that they're all bots (though some might be), it's that they are the lowest quality audience imaginable for a sales objective.

The best form of brand awareness for an author isn't getting a thousand likes on a post. It's getting one person to read your book, love it, and tell five of their friends. That journey starts with a conversion, not a 'like'. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a problem (in this case, the problem of "what should I read next?" or "I need an escape"), not a prerequisite for making a sale. You must switch your campaign objective to one that aligns with your actual goal: selling books and building a loyal readership.

This is also why your organic reach has tanked. Years ago, you could build a huge following organically on Facebook. Today, the platform's business model is to restrict the organic reach of pages to a tiny fraction of their followers, forcing you to pay to reach the very people who chose to follow you. It's frustrating, but it's the reality of the platform. You aren't being punished; you're just experiencing the system working as intended. The solution isn't to try and game the organic algorithm, but to build a paid strategy that works.

I'd say you need to fix your offer before you fix your ads

This might be tough to hear, but the number one reason most advertising campaigns fail has nothing to do with the ad creative, the targeting, or the budget. It's the offer. In your case, the implicit offer in your posts is likely "Here's my book, please buy it." For a cold audience of people who have never heard of you, that's a huge ask. It's high-friction and low-value from their perspective.

Think about it like dating. You wouldn't walk up to a stranger and ask them to marry you. You'd start with a coffee, a conversation. Advertising is the same. You need to offer something of value for free to earn the right to ask for the sale later. You need to create a moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell themselves on you as an author.

For an author, the gold standard offer is a free chapter download. Or maybe the first three chapters. This is the perfect low-risk "first date". It achieves several critical things:

1. It qualifies your audience: Anyone willing to trade their email address for a sample of your book is, by definition, a potential reader. They are infinitely more valuable than someone who just clicks 'like'.
2. It gives them a taste: If your writing is good, the first chapter will hook them. They'll be selling themselves on buying the book to find out what happens next. The product does the selling for you.
3. It builds your most valuable asset: It allows you to build an email list. Your Facebook page could be shut down tomorrow, your organic reach can go to zero, but your email list is an asset you own and control forever. It's a direct line to your most loyal fans, and it's where you'll announce new books and drive sales for years to come.

So, before you spend another pound on ads, your first job is to create this offer. Take the first chapter of your best book, save it as a PDF, and set up a simple landing page (you can use services like MailerLite, ConvertKit, or even a simple page on your own website) where people can enter their email address to receive it. This page should have one job and one job only: to convince someone to download the free chapter. That's it. No links to your other social media, no complicated navigation. Just a great book cover, a compelling hook about the story, and a big button that says "Download The First Chapter Now".

You'll need a proper sales funnel to sell your books

Once you have your offer (the free chapter), you can build a simple but incredibly effective sales funnel. This is just a fancy term for the journey you take a complete stranger on to turn them into a loyal fan. It has three basic stages.

Stage 1: Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Finding New Readers

This is where you run your paid ads. But instead of boosting a post, you'll go into the main Facebook Ads Manager (it looks intimidating, but it's where the real power is). You'll create a new campaign and choose the "Leads" or "Conversions" objective. You'll then create an ad that speaks directly to your ideal reader and promotes your free chapter download. The ad will link to the landing page you created. The algorithm will then go and find people inside your target audience who are most likely to actually sign up and give you their email, not just 'like' the post. This is a fundamental shift in strategy and the single biggest change you need to make.

Stage 2: Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Nurturing Interest

This stage is all about email. Once someone is on your list, you don't just hit them with a "buy my book" email straight away. You build a relationship. You can set up a simple, automated email sequence. The first email delivers the free chapter. A few days later, another email might share some behind-the-scenes info about the characters or the world you've built. A week later, you could share a great review. You're warming them up, reminding them about the story, and building trust. This costs you nothing extra to do, and it's where the real pursuasion happens.

Stage 3: Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Driving the Sale

After you've provided value and built some rapport, now you can ask for the sale. The final email in your sequence can be the direct pitch: "Loved the first chapter? Here's where you can buy the full book to find out what happens next." Because they are now a 'warm' lead, their likelyhood of buying is dramatically higher than a stranger seeing a random post in their feed. You can also run retargeting ads on Facebook specifically to people who visited your landing page but didn't buy the book, reminding them to finish the story.

This entire process can be automated. Once it's set up, your ads bring in new potential readers every day, your email system nurtures them, and a percentage of them will convert into buyers, all running in the background. That's a real marketing system, not just scattered posts.

I'd say you should target readers, not just 'likers'

A proper funnel is useless without the right audience. Inside Ads Manager, you have access to incredibly powerful targeting tools that are completely unavailable through the "Boost Post" button. This is where you put your author hat on and think deeply about your ideal reader.

Don't just target a broad interest like "Books" or "Reading". That's far too vague. You need to get specific. I usually group interests into themes. Ask yourself:

• What other authors do my readers love? If you write thrillers, you should be targeting fans of Lee Child, David Baldacci, or Stephen King. Facebook allows you to target people who have expressed an interest in these authors' pages. This is your number one targeting method.
• What genres are they into? Target specific genres like "Science Fiction novels", "Fantasy literature", or "Historical fiction".
• What publications or communities are they part of? Can you target people who like "Goodreads", specific book bloggers, or magazines like "The New York Review of Books"?
• What films or TV shows are similar to your book? If your book has a similar feel to "Game of Thrones", target fans of the show.

You want to create ad sets for each of these themes and test them against each other with a small budget (maybe £10 per day per ad set). After a few days, you'll see which audiences are delivering the cheapest leads (email signups). You then turn off the poorly performing ones and move the budget to the winners. This is how you systematically find pockets of your ideal readers online. One campaign we worked on for an eLearning course managed to drive over 447% ROAS in just the first week by getting this kind of specific testing right.

Once you have about 100-500 people on your email list from these efforts, you can unlock the most powerful tool of all: Lookalike Audiences. You can upload your email list to Facebook and tell it, "Go and find me millions of other people in the UK who share the same characteristics, behaviours, and interests as the people on my list." The algorithm will then build a massive, highly qualified audience for you to target. This is how you scale from getting a few signups a day to getting hundreds.

You probably should understand the numbers, it's not as scary as it looks

So, what should all this cost? The answer is "it depends", but we can establish some realistic benchmarks. We are no longer measuring fuzzy things like 'reach'. We are measuring one thing: Cost Per Lead (CPL), which is the cost to get one person's email address by them downloading your free chapter.

Based on our experience running hundreds of campaigns, in a developed, English-speaking country like the UK, you can typically expect the following:

• Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost for someone to click your ad will likely be between £0.50 and £1.50.
• Landing Page Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who click the ad and then actually sign up on your landing page. A decent page should convert between 10% and 30% of visitors.

Let's do the maths. In a worst-case scenario (£1.50 CPC / 10% conversion rate), your Cost Per Lead would be £15. In a best-case scenario (£0.50 CPC / 30% conversion rate), your CPL would be around £1.67. Most likely, you'll land somewhere in the middle, probably around £2-£5 per email signup. Now, you might think, "£5 to give away a free chapter?!" This is where we need to think about the bigger picture and the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a reader.

A reader who loves your first book probably won't stop there. They'll buy your second, your third, and so on. They become a true fan. The real question isn't "how much did this lead cost?" but "how much is this fan worth?"

Let's imagine your average book profit is £4. If a new fan buys just three of your books over the next two years, their value is £12. Suddenly, paying £4 to acquire that fan seems like an incredible bargain. You spent £4 to make £12 – that's a 3x return on your investment. This is the maths that professional marketers use to scale businesses. It frees you from worrying about small daily costs and lets you focus on profitable, long-term growth. I've included a simple calculator below so you can play with your own numbers.

You'll need an actionable plan

I know this is a lot of information, and it represents a significant shift from what you've been doing. But this is the path that actually works. It's not about finding a magic trick to get more organic reach; it's about building a predictable, scalable system for finding readers and selling books. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below as a clear action plan.

This is obviously a more involved process than just hitting "Boost", but this is what professional marketing looks like. It takes some setting up, but once it's running, it's a machine that works for you. Your experience isn't poor or abnormal; it's the default result of using Facebook's most basic, and frankly misleading, advertising tool. The courses you took probably didn't help because they likely focused on content creation rather than the direct-response marketing principles that actually sell products.

Navigating this shift can be challenging, especially when you're also trying to write. This is often where expert help can make a significant difference, not just in setting things up correctly but in testing, optimising, and scaling the system to ensure you're not just spending money, but profitably acquiring new fans. We spend all day inside these platforms, and a small tweak to targeting or ad copy that we've learned from thousands of pounds of ad spend can be the difference between a campaign that fails and one that flies.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and have us take a look at your specific situation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can map out what a strategy like this would look like for you. It's often really helpful for authors to get a clear, expert perspective on their specific goals.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh