Episode
Ads, Discovery, and the Author’s Digital Future with Mal Cooper
- Podcast
- Hapitalist
- Published
- Apr 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3795
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Summary
* Listen on the app of your choice Mal Cooper — sci-fi author (M.D. Cooper), Facebook ads expert, and co-founder of The Writing Wives — joins Russell to talk about what it actually takes to run ads, why indie authors keep handing money to corporations, and what the web got right the first time around. Here are some favorite insights from this episode. 1. Facebook Ads Have No Silver Bullet — And Never Will Every course promises a system. The answer is always the same: make good creative, test a lot of options, and see what sticks. That’s not a cop-out — it’s the reality of a platform with hundreds of variables per ad, most of them unknowable. You’re simultaneously trying to satisfy Facebook’s AI, get it in front of the right humans, and then convert on your product page. The person running the ads is also a variable. Two different ad managers can run campaigns on the same book and get completely different results — not because one has the secret formula, but because creativity is personal and Facebook is a black box even to Facebook. 2. Do the Creative Work First, the Admin Work Second Don’t follow Facebook’s flow, which buries creative at the end of a long form-filling process. By the time you get there, you’re burned out and you’ll post anything just to be done. Do your images, copy, and headlines on one day. Build the actual campaign structure on another. Splitting those two modes — creative and administrative — is the difference between launching something you’re proud of and rage-quitting the ads manager. 3. Authorring Is the Webring, Rebuilt for Direct Sales The core problem with every indie author running their own store: discoverability disappears. Buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Authorring (a…