How a Kindle Unlimited Author Nearly Tripled Her Income With Trial Reels

Wendy Smith posted her trial reels results in the 20Booksto50K Facebook group, and it was too good not to pass on. So we asked if we could reprint it here. She said yes.

Wendy is 100% Kindle Unlimited, a former Facebook ads author who walked away from ads and found trial reels instead. She uses AuthorScale to make the Kindle screenshot videos she describes below. The KDP screenshots at the end are hers.

Everything from here on is Wendy's, lightly formatted. Thank you, Wendy. 💙

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Long time lurker, first time poster.

I wanted to post this because this is one of the groups where I've read about trial reels, and I just wanted to share my experiences with these and also what I've been using to post them.

I have been self publishing since 2013. Up until recently, I was a Facebook ads girl. They are what enabled me to go full-time back in 2018. But with the changes they've made, at the end of last year I decided to pull the plug as I felt I was just burning money. This has meant that this year has been particularly challenging.

I've also been using slideshows on TikTok. They were doing well enough to fill the gap the ads left, but I've been feeling like I'd hit a ceiling with the revenue they could generate as that's been pretty consistent from January to the end of May. But for most of that I was using bulk create in Canva which is a great tool, but the whole process was time consuming and with work and family commitments, I was feeling really burned out.

Toward the end of April, I saw someone I know comment about AuthorScale and how good it was. I had taken a look way back in 2024, but I wasn't getting the content I wanted out of it, so I left it. But I decided to give it another go, and was immediately impressed at how well it identified scenes I never thought of using, and making my first slideshows with that content got immediate results, but nothing too crazy.

I switched over to using it for making my slideshows and it sped up my workflow considerably. I'd been seeing people posting on Threads in particular about trial reels and had access to them. I kept thinking I should give it a go, and when I finally made my first screenshot reel manually in Canva, it took an embarrassing amount of time. lol

And then AuthorScale released their Kindle screenshot feature. I started making two slide slideshows for TikTok with screenshots, and they weren't going hugely viral, but it was faster than posting the slideshows I had been. And then I finally got my act together and gave trial reels a go.

I started with footage I'd filmed on my phone with the book in the background, and though they started slow, I had a few that hit several thousand views. I switched to using stock video and had mixed results. And then I saw someone comment on Threads that page flips were working for them. I'd used those before back when I started using TikTok and they hadn't worked, but I gave it a go and then I really saw results.

Things really took a turn when I accidentally didn't flip the switch to make it a trial reel and posted a public reel which cross posted to Facebook, and it hit 160k views. So, from then on, I changed my process and now I post both trial reels and public reels. If I get a few thousand views and a good number of likes on a trial reel, I also share it to my feed.

I had several go viral in June and I ended up nearly tripling my income and it was biggest month of my entire career. July is looking similar.

I'm so glad I saw the post and tried AuthorScale as it's sped up my workflow immensely, and I'm not spending hours making content. I'm also really grateful to everyone else who has posted about trial reels because I'm not sure I would have tried them without all the information out there. I've also increased my Instagram following by around 370, and my Facebook page which has been around 5400 followers for years has grown by about 1100 so far.

Other notes: My books are all in Kindle Unlimited.

There are limits on trial reels of 150 a month, and if you exceed that they suspend your ability to use them for 30 days. I post 3 per day. I've seen people post that you can mitigate that by posting public reels, but I can't verify that and if it exists I don't know the ratio.

I think being consistent is important. You can schedule both trial reels and public reels in advance. And don't be afraid to experiment. I remixed that first reel that went viral, added an emoji to the text to make it different and it's sitting at 27k views. Most of the reels I've posted, trial or not, pick up very quickly, but I've also had reels pick up after 5 days.

My next steps are to give YouTube shorts a try and also get back into posting consistently again on TikTok because I've let that lapse while focusing on what's working. I have crossposted some of the reels with encouraging results, but I'm hoping that with the extra income I can pay my son to pick up some of that work.

I've posted a couple of screenshots from KDP to show the impact this has had for me, and I hope this information helps others.

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From the comments

Wendy answered a lot of questions in the thread. A few clarifications worth pulling out from the replies:

The reels are just book pages, no face. "Just the pages of the book. I hate myself on camera lol." She posts three trial reels a day, and shares the ones that do well to her profile and Facebook too.

She doesn't use the AI. "It will go through and identify the scenes using AI, but you can make your own manual screenshots, which is what I like doing anyway because I want control over which excerpts it uses. You can scroll through your manuscript, highlight what you want and it will produce the screenshot with the highlights." What works best for her: emotional or funny scenes.

Scheduling. She schedules directly in Instagram, turns on cross-posting to Facebook, and sets it for whenever she wants it to go out. Facebook is its own beast, though: "I have quite a few that do well on Instagram and don't on FB."

About that A$. Wendy is based in New Zealand, but KDP doesn't offer NZD, so she reports in Australian dollars as the closest option. To reach US readers she posts from an old iPhone 11 with a US SIM card and a VPN.

On the 1,000-follower rule. "I've seen posts that it's 1000, but I don't think that's firm because I had about 630 when I started using them."

The Kindle screenshot videos Wendy mentions are built into AuthorScale, and you can now post trial reels straight to Instagram from AuthorScale too.