Facebook Banned Me From Promoting My Queer Novels
Homophobia in social media advertising
I have been running Facebook ads on and off ever since I published my first novel in 2018. I’ve occasionally run into issues with their advertising review team, but none as seemingly insurmountable as what I’ve just experienced.
Why was I running Facebook ads?
Over the years, I experimented with boosted posts from my Facebook author’s page, having varying degrees of success. What I eventually learned was that if I kept the ad running for a longer time with a smaller budget, I would have a lot more success than running a short campaign with a larger budget.
Instead of running a quick weekend campaign over two to four days with a budget of $50-$100, I began running month-long campaigns for only $30–40. The shorter campaigns only got me around $10–20 in sales, where the longer ones led to $100-$200. Once I figured that trick out, I launched a new campaign at the start of every month and kept earning a steady and slowly increasing stream of revenue.
When I tried Amazon ads or running boosted Twitter posts, neither worked nearly as well. Both required more upfront cost and wouldn’t let me run anything for as low as $1 per day, and I never saw the same return on my investment as I…
