At the start of September 2026, I decided to run an experiment with my Facebook page. That page had been fairly neglected with the occasional post when I had a new book or program, but not much else. Posting was patchy at best.
The task was simple:
Post on my page once a day, in a way that felt natural to me, and see if book sales will increase.
That was it. My goal wasn’t more followers or engagement, it was sales.
I started with the following information:
- The page had around 1000 followers
- In August, I sold three print books through Ingram Spark and Amazon, so I had an idea of the types of sales I get without consistent posting
- I also have historical information for the sorts of books that usually sell around this time of year
With this in mind, I got started.
The first post was a general post about all my books with a photo I had taken and a link to my Amazon page, and it went from there.
Over the course of 22 days, I shared book origin stories, personal stories, questions for engagement, behind the scenes and worldbuilding information, I introduced series, and seasonal books. I shared fiction and non-fiction. There was a variety. I included photographs, graphics designed in Canva, and links so people could easily make a purchase if they wanted to.
The actual posting I found fairly easy. I have a wide variety of books, so I would pick one or two and share something about it. It wasn’t a ‘buy me’ type post, even though they did include purchasing links. The links were to make it easy for people to buy. I stopped on day 22, more about that later.
Initially, the posts got fairly good visibility, though the highest any post got was 100 views, and it went down as the experiment continued. Based on the statistics, Facebook tells me that views went up 1116%! But if you look at the breakdown, it’s not that impressive. Less than 10% of the followers on my page saw what I posted.
I also gained a few new followers, and lost some, but followers wasn’t the aim of the experiment.
The most important part was what happened with sales.
The last time I checked, I had sold 4 books through Ingram Spark and had 1 page read on KDP. This is on par with what happens when I don’t post on Facebook, so I can’t link any of those sales with the experiment.
I was quietly chugging along with this… then Facebook changed the rules.
A couple of days ago, I got a notice that I couldn’t post links in posts, so I changed things to put a link in a comment. This makes it harder to post as I need more steps with each item. Then it restricted links in comments too, making it so that people couldn’t click on them! It was at this point, I decided to end the experiment.
Given that part of the goal was to post in a way that suited me, that I found easy, these changes made it harder to post, so that was the end.
Overall, I found that this was a useful experiment.
It found that I could post daily, so long as it was a way that suited me and was easy.
It found that posting that way didn’t boost sales, not in any meaningful way. If there had been even a slight jump in sales, that would have shown this was useful, but there wasn’t.
It found that Facebook didn’t make things easy. The algorithms weren’t showing my posts to my followers, and the restrictions on links made things more challenging.
My conclusion with this experiment is that I have tested organic Facebook posting on my page, using a way that suits me, and it didn’t result in increased sales.
Facebook was pushing a subscription to pay so that I can include links and have my posts shown to more people. I honestly don’t think it would be a good return on investment, at least not for me. For what they want me to pay, I could do a market or two and I know I get book sales there.
The goal of my experiment was to boost sales. Facebook activity went up, but there was no noticeable boost in sales.
I’m now looking at what to do for my next marketing experiment to boost sales.
