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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 (authorring.net, two R’s) solves this with a genre-based discovery network — a widget that sits on author websites and lets readers hop between stores the way early internet users hopped between webrings. Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings, and pay a dollar a month. It’s not another middleman. It’s collective discoverability without ceding control to a retailer.
4. Your Email Open Rates Are Lying to You
Half of all email opens are now bots — up from about 5% in 2019. The people your platform says aren’t opening are often your real readers (iPhone users, privacy-conscious subscribers who block tracking pixels). The people flagged as active openers are frequently bots that fire every tracking code without hesitation. The counterintuitive takeaway: don’t prune your list based on open rate data. Mal’s been saying this for six or seven years. Russell proved it himself — he moved 10,000 “inactive” subscribers to a separate Substack, started sending old content, and 30% of them opened within a month.
5. AI Didn’t Replace the Open Source Foundation — It Depends on It
The tools that let authors build things like Authorring exist because of 20 years of developers releasing free code into the world. Claude can’t write a secure connection from scratch — it’s standing on OpenSSL and thousands of other libraries built by people who just put their work out there. That’s also, Mal points out, probably why developers didn’t anticipate authors being upset about training data: in their world, sharing your work freely is the default. The cultural disconnect between open source and intellectual property isn’t hypocrisy — it’s two completely different relationships with creative output colliding in real time.
What Is Authorring?
The problem with every indie author running their own direct store: you’ve traded Amazon’s 30% cut for complete invisibility. At least Amazon had traffic. Your store has you — and whatever you can afford to spend on Facebook ads to drag people there one by one.
Mal’s framing is blunt: buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Nobody’s doing that. Readers go where the books are, and right now that’s still Amazon, because Amazon solved discovery even while extracting a premium for it.
Authorring (authorring.net) is the answer that doesn’t require building another Amazon. It’s a genre-based discovery network — a widget that lives at the top of author websites and lets readers hop between direct stores the way early internet users hopped between sites on a webring. Click “next author” in the romantic fantasy ring and you land on another romantic fantasy author’s store. Keep clicking. Keep buying. No algorithm deciding what you see. No retailer taking a cut.
Direct stores without discoverability are just expensive islands. Running your own store is only half the job. If readers can’t find you without an ad budget, you’ve traded one problem for another.
Collective infrastructure beats going it alone. You don’t need Amazon’s traffic if authors are sending each other readers. Authorring is a bet that a rising tide can be built by the people in the water.
A dollar a month to not feed the algorithm machine. The math isn’t complicated. Get approved, embed the widget, and let readers wander their way to you.
Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings (the approval exists specifically to avoid the Amazon categories problem — no thriller authors sneaking into romance), and pay a dollar a month. They can be in multiple rings as long as their store actually has books in those categories. The goal is to train readers that the bar at the top of these sites is worth clicking — that there’s a whole world of direct-selling authors worth exploring, if you just know where to look.
Mal built it because he kept lamenting the same problem on podcasts: he wanted to help authors, but not by becoming a publisher or creating another middleman. The real power of direct sales is owning the reader relationship — email addresses, upsell opportunities, the ability to tell someone about your next book. Authorring gives you discoverability without surrendering that.
