Instagram Trial Reels: How a 6-Figure Author Tripled Her Royalties

Rachel Jonas is a six-figure indie author with around 40 books across two pen names. This year she tripled her monthly royalties, and a series she finished back in 2019 climbed into Amazon's top 4,000 and stayed there for weeks. She did it without running a single ad and without releasing a new book.

Recently she joined us for a live AMA and walked through her whole system, posts and analytics on screen. It pairs well with the trial reels stories Wendy Smith and Skye MacKinnon shared earlier. This post covers her story and her approach, and the full conversation is at the end. She writes dark romance, but nothing in her approach is tied to genre.

Her backstory

In second grade, Rachel's class had to write down what they wanted to be when they grew up. She wrote "author," then scratched it out and wrote "teacher," because even at seven she thought authors don't make money.

She's been publishing since 2013. Her first pen name got to just shy of six figures a year. In 2016 she felt pulled to write something different, started over from scratch with a brand-new pen name and no audience, and her second book under it outsold everything she'd ever written. Then, in 2020, she was among the first authors to jump on the BookTok trend, and it paid off: one of her posts went viral, the first book of her Kings of Cypress Point series climbed to #3 in the entire Kindle store, and she made over six figures in that month alone. The same year, her family moved out of a trailer, and two years later they bought their dream house, in the neighborhood they had been driving through and loving for years.

Why she stopped chasing viral posts

After a stretch where life had to come first and no new book came out, Rachel needed a way back into momentum that didn't depend on luck. Her verdict on TikTok after years on the platform: it's volatile, and building a career around the hope that one video takes off is a plan you can't repeat.

So she flipped it in two ways. Instead of chasing one viral video, she decided to recreate virality through quantity. And instead of betting everything on TikTok, she spread the same content across more platforms, with Instagram, and specifically trial reels, becoming her number one channel. On June 27 she started a posting challenge with herself: 30 days of showing up daily, later extended to 90. By the time of our interview she was at day 81, and the challenge had done its job, because the posting had become a habit she doesn't plan to stop.

It worked. Her monthly royalties tripled compared to the start of the year, and she broke her best-day earnings record for 2026 seven times in a single month, in the middle of summer, usually a slow stretch for authors.

The system, in short

Rachel posts 4 to 6 Instagram trial reels a day, mostly Kindle screenshot posts she batches in AuthorScale while watching TV.

If you haven't used them yet: trial reels are an Instagram feature that shows your reels only to people who don't follow you, which makes them a low-pressure way to get your books in front of new readers. Instagram doesn't document the requirement officially, but many authors get access once they pass 200 followers.

One hook formula has performed especially well for her, and she worked it out herself: present two conflicting ideas, and let the Kindle screenshot underneath be the answer. Here's one of her recent posts using it:

That hook, she says, "sells like crazy."

In the interview she opens her actual accounts and walks through the rest on screen: the posts behind her biggest weeks, why she remakes her winners instead of moving on, and the comment trick that turned into a 300,000-view weekend.

All of it comes from her own testing. She'd be the first to tell you that what works shifts over time, which is why she keeps testing. Try a thing three or four times before judging it, keep what works for your books, drop the rest.

Her platform ranking

Asked to rank the platforms by what they do for her royalties right now, Rachel listed:

1. Instagram (trial reels)
2. Facebook
3. Pinterest
4. YouTube
5. TikTok

(YouTube gets her more views, but TikTok sells better.)

She creates her posts in AuthorScale, downloads them to her phone, and uploads them to Instagram herself, adding a trending sound there. From there, every post cross-posts automatically to both Facebook and Pinterest, through Instagram's Facebook connection and her linked Pinterest business account. So her number two and three platforms run without her touching them. The Pinterest account doing this isn't even a dedicated author account. It's her personal one, where she saves recipes, outfits and travel ideas, switched to a business account and connected to Instagram once. She hasn't touched it since, and it now gets 200,000 monthly views. There have been some months where, in her words, Pinterest absolutely carried her royalties. The chat lit up during this part. "You could charge money for this lol," one viewer wrote, while others admitted they'd completely forgotten Pinterest existed.

(AuthorScale can post directly to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. More integrations are planned.)

Her advice if you're starting from zero

For an indie author just starting out with social, her advice is to make your content stretch: put it everywhere, and get comfortable with the silence at the beginning, because everything starts from zero. Don't wait for a viral post, and don't wait for other people to join you. She ran her challenge alone. Show up for you.

On the hard days, when it feels like an echo chamber, her rule is that the how isn't your business. Decide where you're going, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and treat even the setbacks as part of getting there.

Her six-figure month started on one of those days. Her books were doing well, but she was stuck on one question: "Why is TikTok working for everybody but me?" Her husband was about to go cut the grass, saw her stressing, and said: "Babe, why don't you just come sit on the back porch and relax?" So she sat on the back porch and, since she was sitting there anyway, cleaned up her TikTok account. She unfollowed everyone who wasn't book-related and removed her likes from every video that wasn't about books. The same day, she went to her daughter's softball game and posted. That was the post that blew up.

She closed the live by reminding everyone that you can't get water out of an empty well. Take breaks. Read books that enrich you. Don't run on empty.

Watch the full interview

The whole conversation, including her screen shares of the actual posts, her Pinterest analytics, and the live Q&A, is on our YouTube channel:

Rachel makes all of these posts in AuthorScale, and she says about 90% of the scenes she uses are ones AuthorScale pulled from her book for her. Want to try her workflow on your own book? You can make the same Kindle screenshot posts she does.