Have you ever tried to run an ad on Facebook for an Erotic Romance novel? If you haven’t, let me just tell you that shit is hard and damn near impossible. If you have successfully, how the hell, and can you send me the spell? Because you are clearly using some kind of sorcery and I need in on this. So let me tell you what happened. Gather round my dudes, it’s storytime.
I was going about my day doing some promo/marketing stuff when I got a notification on my Facebook saying that Facebook was going to give me a $5 credit to boost a post from my page so I can run it as an ad. I was sitting here narrowing my eyes at this notification because that’s suspicious right? Turns out, it was 100% legit. Since I had just started posting stuff on social media pages so I wanted to wait to use this credit for a really good post. I had time before the credit expired so I wasn’t worried about it. When I finally posted that my book was available for purchase, I made a post and threw that up on my social media, and then I thought “I can finally use my credit”. Oh, my sweet summer child. No. No, you can’t.
I had the synopsis, links for it, links for my social media pages, and my book cover on that post ready to be turned into an ad only for it to be rejected minutes later. I asked for another review and it was still rejected. Why? Because it violated their policy of having an ad that promoted adult services or products. NOWHERE in my post did it promote anything like that and let me tell you, I have seen MANY ads promoting spicy books with words in the description that were more explicit than any of mine were and those seem to have no problem getting approved.
Now let me fast forward and condense. I tried SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS! I took out “bad” words, I took out links from the description box, I switched my book cover that has A BED (oh no, the horror) to a graphic. I even posted about this problem in one of the writing groups I am in on Facebook and this lovely lady told me that if my book is under “Erotica” or “Erotic Romance” and I put the link directly to where my book is being sold, that may be a big reason why my ad was being rejected. So I thanked her, went to the site she recommended to make a universal link where all the links can be found, posted that instead, and it was STILL rejected.
How many times did these ad bot bitches reject my ad despite changing tons of things around? TWELVE TIMES. Literally, nothing has worked. I spent over 5 hours for 2 days trying to make that ad run and Facebook is just refusing to approve my ad. To the point that my account has been flagged and I can’t invite people to my page. That’s right. I’m somewhat in Facebook jail now. I CANNOT EVEN RIGHT NOW. So I am officially done trying to run my ad now. Just so done. Facebook is NO help at all because there’s no real way to say “Hey, can you stop having a bot see this and have a human review it and tell me exactly what in the hell is being flagged as inappropriate so I can fix it!?”
They have people working there, why can’t one of them help me? Ffs, just let me run my damn ad! It’s not even that bad! I’VE SEEN WAY WORSE! Is it because I only used the credit and not any of my money? Is it because I’m a new author? “It’s because I’m green, isn’t it!?” What makes it even worse is that I spent time trying to make the ad “appropriate” instead of writing anything new today. Now I’m too frustrated to write anything. Thank you for reading my rant. Also, don’t try and run a damn ad by yourself on Facebook because those bot bitches will laugh and reject it.