📲 The Grid: February's round up
Freebies, post ideas, need-to-know updates, and a round up of the best booky, marketing-ish, social-media-esque advice I've found on the internet this month
🧠 FREE workshops!
In case you missed it I’ve created two FREE workshops that address some of the most commonly reported barriers to writers and authors using Instagram effectively, confidently and sustainably.
If your problem is that spending time on Instagram makes you feel a bit rubbish or inadequate then my prescription is to write your own Instagram Manifesto:
If your problem is you feel like Instagram sucks up too much of your precious time, then try this workshop instead:
🚨Calling historical fiction authors
The lovely pair at Time Hoppers,
and would like to hear from you if you’re a historical fiction novelist. They host a growing and highly engaged community of historical fiction readers who’d love to hear more about your book. If you’re a historical fiction author publishing this year – trad or independent – drop Rachel or Kat a DM via their Time Hoppers Instagram account to chat further.💡Post ideas for dayssss
Scroll down to the bottom section of this email to find some interesting post formats that I’ve found on my travels around Instagram this month. Looking at what’s working for other people is one way of getting the creative juices flowing BUT if you feel like what you need is something more bespoke to you and your readers, then…
… the ⚡️SPARK! workshop is returning for a third time! Over 40 writers and authors so far have spent 90 minutes with me to create a bank of bespoke Instagram post ideas to show their ideal reader why they should care about their book. Now it’s your turn!
Come along and I’ll guide you through a set of prompts to generate approx 100 post ideas - that’s 6 months worth of posts if you post 4 x per week - that are tailor-made to attract and engage your ideal readers.
This is what previous attendees have said about the workshop:
‘Thank you for giving such a brilliant workshop today, I took so much away and am brimming with ideas for how to connect with readers and talk about my book. I've been to a fair few industry sessions and have a background in corporate communications and this was something completely different.’ -
, author of ‘Costanza’‘I found the prompts really helpful and they inspired a lot of ideas. I also appreciated the reminder to think of the purpose of each Instagram post, whether that's to entertain, to educate or to connect, and that authors should be posting for their ideal readers...not other writers!’ -
Williamson, author of ‘The Language of Dragons’📍Pinned posts
This short clip from drbeckyatgoodinside feels pretty relevant to any writer or author who’s feeling sticky and uncomfortable in your marketing and promotion: resilience and success come from the amount of time you can tolerate not knowing what the hell you’re doing!
In this typically insightful piece from
she asks what if it’s not the worst time to be an author…?
Finally, I L-O-V-E-D this interview with left-wing technologist, Lou Millar-MacHugh and I recommend taking a look at their free resource, ‘A Leftist’s Guide To Staying Off Your Phone’. They say things like, ‘That's the hook cycle. It [social media] wants to feed you little emotional nuggets so that you keep looking for those emotional nuggets subconsciously, and if you're able to, when you're caught in that cycle, recognize that it's happening, it loses its power over you’ , which made me literally clap, fist pump, and do a happy dance in my desk chair.
💬 Need-To-Know Instagram Updates
After ramming through a whole bunch of updates during January, February has been much quieter on the update front, but here’s one you might have missed that is really worth trying out, plus three more coming up:
Trial Reels: have you tried it yet?
Trial Reels is a new feature introduced by Instagram in January, ostensibly to allow accounts to test new kinds of content without it being shown to your existing followers. What canny creators quickly realised is that this features offers an opportunity to get your Reel in front of more accounts that don’t already follow you and I’m hearing reports of some pretty impressive growth numbers as a result. I’ll be honest - I’ve tested it on some of my best performing Reels and I haven’t seen any significant results from it yet, but I’m continuing to experiment because its a way to squeeze every last drop of value from your content, without expending much more effort (assuming you remember to save your Reel to your camera roll before you post it so you can easily reuse it!).
If growth is a priority for you might also be interested in upgrading your subscription to become a member of TOO MUCH INSTAGRAM as last week I started the 🏋🏻♀️training sessions🏋🏻♀️ for a 🏃🏻♀️Growth Sprint🏃🏻♀️ that I’m leading in March. I’d love you to join us 👯♀️
Ones to watch out for…
you probably noticed the change to the vertical grid BUT did you know that one knock on effect is that Instagram are looking at moving highlights from your bio, into their own tab? Read the caption under this post for more details but if you’ve been puzzling over how best to use your highlights, hold your horses because things could be about to change!
Instagram is testing a new dislike button for comments. I have this feature and this is what it looks like:
According to Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, “Our hope is that this might help make comments more friendly on Instagram,” but they’re looking to see how it works in practice before deciding whether to roll it out more widely.
Instagram is introducing a new post format: Reels Carousels. I haven’t been served any of these in my feed yet but I understand that, as the name suggests, they are multi-page posts, made up of multiple videos. The best case scenario is that this content format will combine the reach rates of Reels and the engagement rates of Carousels so they’re definitely a content format to experiment with when it rolls out across your account.
💡Five post formats to try in March:
#wheremylorestarted single-handedly proving that hashtags can still be a useful way to group content so it’s easily searchable 💃🏻. My personal fave of this trend is
’s who subverted the trend and sent me down a rabbit hole of 90s-00s Saturday night tv.17 posts and over 12.8k followers? Proof, in case anyone needed it, that simple, visual, relatable challenges can still cut through allllll of the noise online.
another fab stunt - although this one’s definitely from the heart - is this from
the day after her book launch party. It was Valentine’s Day so the timing was perfect, the ‘vox pop’ style was super engaging and compelling, AND it was perfectly aligned to the subject of her book 👏🏼 PRO TIP: have a look at www.awarenessdays.com for the month of publication of your book to see if there’s anything you can piggyback on 🐽
it seems I’ve got something for content that feels very ‘in the moment’ this month, which tbh is exactly where trends have been heading for a while: away from the curated and polished, and towards ‘slightly unhinged voice-note to my bestie’ vibes. This impromptu story-time from author Jenni Bayliss nails it 👏🏼
if video still terrifies you though, why not flex some creative muscles with a ‘the vibes I bring to the function’ collage like this one 👇🏼 from historical romance novelist Kate Clisson
If you’ve found this email helpful or interesting, I’d love it if you would share it, either here on Substack, or anywhere else that you hang out with other writers 👇🏼 See you next month!
Can I dislike the dislike button?! (Thanks for this roundup!)