Notification to author on draft

How would I go about notifying the blog author rather than the entire author user-group when their post status has been changed to a draft.

I tried the below and it didn’t work. Any help is highly appreciated!:
if ( ‘draft’ == $new_status ) {
// You’ll need to get term IDs for your user groups and place them as
// comma-separated values

$authornotify = ($post->post_author);
$edit_flow->notifications->save_post_following_users( $post->ID, $authornotify );
return $send_notif = true;
}

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