This Wide Author Sells Books With Instagram Trial Reels

When Skye MacKinnon broke down her trial reels experiment in the Wide for the Win Facebook group, the thread lit up — and we knew the wide authors in our community would want to see it. Skye kindly agreed to let us reprint it in full.

We're reposting it for all the wide authors in our community: it's one of the clearest, most honest write-ups we've seen on trial reels for wide books, not just Kindle Unlimited. We also shared Wendy Smith's trial reels breakdown from the KU side, and the two are worth reading together. The playbook is similar. Skye uses AuthorScale to make the Kindle screenshot videos she talks about below, but she's not selling anything here. She's just showing her work, numbers and all.

What follows is Skye's write-up exactly as she posted it, with only light formatting from us. Thank you, Skye. 💙

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Topic: Trial Reels

For the last few weeks, I've been experimenting with Instagram trial reels and it's definitely made an impact on my sales. I read about them in several author groups, but it was always KU authors finding success with them and I've been disappointed too often by trying marketing strategies that worked well for KU but not for wide, so I went into it with a healthy dose of scepticism.

My verdict: they work for wide books (although not as well as for KU books). They sell books and grow followers. I'm a convert.

First, what are trial reels? They are videos that you upload to Instagram (and they also get shared to FB) but unlike normal reels that get shown to your followers, these get shown to people who don't follow you yet. That means you can reach a much larger audience. You need 1,000 followers to be eligible for this feature. They don't show on your normal Instagram grid until you switch them from a trial reel to a normal one (so if you went to my Insta account just now, you couldn't see any of the ones I'm running).

My goal: sell books with as little effort as possible.

i.e. I don't want to spend hours making pretty videos - I want to automate the process as much as possible.

To make it simple, I use AuthorScale to create Kindle screenshot videos: an extract from my book with a random stock video in the background and usually some stock music. I then post them to Instagram (and FB), TikTok and my Youtube channel. I'll post some links to example reels in the comments.

It takes me 5mins tops per video and I usually do them in the evening while watching telly (to reach a more international audience).

I first tried them with newer titles, but that made it harder to see the impact clearly, so then I pivoted to backlist series that weren't selling much. In the screenshot you'll see a series that's 8 years old, has little to do with what I write nowadays, and sells maybe 10 copies a month organically. I made 6 screenshot videos for it (best one got 38k views but most were around the 1-5k range) and as you can see, it had an immediate effect on sales.

What I've learned

• trial reels can take a while to find their audience. Some of my most successful ones sat at a few hundred views for days before suddenly shooting up to tens of thousands of views.
• some reels do better on Insta than FB, and vice versa. If your instagram stats show comments that you can't see, go check your FB page, they'll likely have been posted there.
• Reusing content helps a lot. If a particular video did well, I'll make a similar version with a slightly different background, hook and/or music. I had one video reach 76k views so I used exactly the same screenshot again five days later and got 139k views.
• Videos where I made it very clear what book the excerpt is from, either in the video itself or in the caption, work best. For Tiktok videos the accepted wisdom used to be not showing the title so that you'd get engagement through comments asking for it, but I've not found this to be true for trial reels.
• Backgrounds don't seem to make much of a difference. I've tried everything from things related to the book to random scenery to page flips to dancing videos. Make sure to have something with movement without being too distracting.
• Stock music works as well as trending sounds for me.
• There is absolutely no correlation between which videos do well on Insta and their views on Tiktok. Some of my 50k+ views reels had less than 1k views on Tiktok.
• I've been getting a steady growth in followers on both Insta and FB since I started with reels.
• Bad news: They still work better for KU than wide. I average 1 wide sale for about 3-5k views, but when I tried it for a KU series, I got way more reads. groans in wide

One caveat: because trial reels are shown to people outside your audience, you might end up with lots of views for the wrong reasons. One of my videos got 130k views and almost 10k shares - but those were mostly due to people going "what the hell did I just watch" because it was a sentient object romance and was shown to people who'd never come across that before 😂 Great for engagement and views, and while I got some sales, it wasn't as much as it would have been had this been shown to 130k people who actually liked that genre.

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From the comments

The thread under Skye's post turned into a Q&A of its own. Here's what stood out from her replies:

The two reels she shared. This Instagram reel is the sentient object romance about a washing machine, which she described as "the most engagement but the wrong audience" (the same 130k-view video from her caveat above). This Facebook reel for Frozen Heart, a reverse harem romance set in Edinburgh, is the one that "sold the most wide books."

She's not the only wide author seeing this work. One author in the comments: "I have been doing this for about a month as well and my sales have doubled. And I'm wide 100%." Another: "I'm using the music in AuthorScale and just got 42k views on one of my reels."

On the details. Skye posts daily, one to four times depending on how busy she is, sending the same video to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and just varying the hashtags. And while Instagram's help pages still say you need 1,000 followers for trial reels, several authors in the thread reported being eligible at around 200.

Skye makes her Kindle screenshot videos with AuthorScale — and since we can now post directly to Instagram, you can send your own trial reels out without ever leaving the app.