There’s no secret to the romance audiences I use. Just a lot of testing. These are a few that work for me. Try one of them yourself and see if it works for your books.

These audiences are primarily for romance. They won’t work as well for other genres. If you use these audiences, make sure you follow this basic setup. We want our ads to run optimally, which means ensuring they all run to only women over the age of 21. Men don’t buy enough romance novels to make advertising to them worth it.

BASIC SET UP:

Turn Advantage+ Audience OFF (Click ‘Use Original Audience Settings’ while setting up your Ad Set. )

Location: United States

Ages: 21 – 65+

Gender: Female

These are the basic settings I use for every audience I run.

I turn Advantage+ Audience Off for all Traffic Campaigns. The option you want is called Advantage Detailed Targeting. The reason we want this and not the confusingly-similar Advantage+ Audience is because Advantage+ Audience can target men. Based on my testing, it makes Traffic campaigns less efficient and can increase Cost-Per-Acquisition by up to 30%. It's best to use Original Audience Settings for now. I also up the age to 21+ just to be safe and ensure that the campaign is only targeting women.

A Note About Books Set Outside the US: These audiences are all based on books set in the United States. If your book is set elsewhere, I have found it can help to narrow the audience down by including interests in Tourism and interests in the country where the book is set in the “Must Also Match” section of the audience setup. For example, if my book was set in Italy, I’d add the following to the audience.

Must Also Match:

Interests: Tourism or Italy.

THE AUDIENCES:

With the basic setup complete, we can build the audience by setting our interest and behavior targets.

General Purpose Romance (The Big Six)

People Who Match:

Interests: Danielle Steel, Sylvia Day, Nora Roberts, Diana Gabaldon, Contemporary Romance, E.L. James

This audience is the creation of Nicholas Erik and is one of the best general purpose romance audiences I’ve used. Multiple books have been launched into the Amazon Top 10 using this audience alone. It is an excellent audience to start with for any contemporary romance author.

General Purpose Romance (The Big Eight)

People Who Match:

Interests: Danielle Steel, Sylvia Day, Nora Roberts, Diana Gabaldon, Contemporary Romance, Sophie Kinsella, E.L. James or Colleen Hoover

This is a slight tweak on the popular Big Six audience. An excellent control/general purpose Romance audience, this version adds Sophie Kinsella and Colleen Hoover to the Six to modernize the interests a bit. It’s an excellent starting point for any romance subgenre and since it is broad, it can be narrowed by targeted behaviors and additional interests in the "Must Also Match" section to work more effectively with different niches.

Spicier Romance

People Who Match:

Interests: EL James, Sylvia Day, Diana Gabaldon, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel or Contemporary Romance

And Must Also Match:

Interests: Desperate housewives, Gossip Girl, Love & Sex, Scandal, Sex and the City, Shameless, Skins, The Affair, The Tudors, Vampire Diaries or True Blood

I’ve written about this one before. This audience basically takes the Big Six (or Big Eight) and narrows it by a collection of interests that lean towards the lascivious – or at least as lascivious as Facebook will let you target – which can be helpful when you want to reach people who enjoy true steam and spice in their romance novels. It has outperformed the General Purpose Romance audience for some authors in 500-click tests.

Dark Romance

People Who Match:

Interests: Psychological thriller, Gothic fiction, Dark Fantasy, True Crime, Horror Movies or Colleen Hoover

And Must Also Match:

Interests: Romance Novels

This is a fairly broad audience that has shown some initial success advertising Dark romance more effectively than the previous Dark audience I previously shared.

Romantasy/Magical Romance:

People Who Match:

Interests: Hallmark Channel, Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, Romance Novels, Laurell K. Hamilton or Paranormal Romance.

I’ve been using this audience –modified to include interests in tourism and a foreign country in the “Must Also Match” per my note above – for ads for a magical romance set in Europe that released recently. Currently the ads running to this audience have a Cost Per Acquisition of $2.85 compared to the Average CPA of $4.70 for the feed ads in the campaign.

Broad Paranormal Romance:

People Who Match:

Interests: Sarah J. Maas, Brenda Novak, Lora Leigh, Danielle Steel, Jojo Moyes, Sylvia Day, Nora Roberts, Jill Shalvis, Karen Marie Moning, Laurell K. Hamilton, Lori Foster, Diana Gabaldon, Julie Kenner, Jeaniene Frost, Patricia Briggs, Contemporary romance, Gena Showalter, Debbie Macomber, Carly Phillips, Charlaine Harris, Robyn Carr, Susan Mallery, Christine Feehan, Kim Harrison, Kresley Cole, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Paranormal romance, E. L. James or Jessica Sorensen

And Must Also Match:

Behaviors: Engaged Shoppers

This is a pretty broad and inclusive audience that has been used by a few different authors with whom I work. In any case, I have tested it and I’m currently running ads to it for a paranormal shifter romance series.

What About Broad Targeting?

I’m often asked if Broad Targeting - aka just targeting one massive demographic or interest like all women 21+ or all people interested in romance novels in the US - is the most effective way to find an audience. This strategy became popular after Facebook updated its audience algorithm in early 2024. After that update, Facebook will now always initiate an ad campaign by showing ads to your warmest audience - fans of your page, people who have engaged with your page, anyone who has your FB pixel on their device, etc. So the strategy being proliferated is that it is best to cast as wide a net as possible and then let Facebook’s audience AI take the wheel.

The issue with broad targeting is that while it can work well in some situations (usually for Sales objective campaigns, where Facebook is getting real-time data on who is buying what from your store), usually it is hard to scale ads to a broad audience up if you are selling on Amazon and running traffic campaigns. People are frequently misled because broad targeted audiences frequently show some initial success - again, because Facebook is starting with your biggest fans - but left to its own devices the FB Audience algorithm is going to seek out cheap clicks, not people who are likely to convert. Consequently, the performance of broad audiences tends to decay quickly once your warm audience has been exhausted and the algo begins to seek out those cheap clicks.

From my testing, it is almost always better to steer the algorithm with targeted interests or guidelines like the audiences above do.

Hopefully these audiences give you some material to work with as you build out your own ad campaigns. Feel free to copy them, modify them and most importantly test them against other audiences like Lookalikes and general broad audience.