I've spent twenty years in marketing. Three CMO roles, advised +15 startups on growth strategies. I know how to research a platform when I need to.
A few weeks ago I went into my cave for a week. YouTube videos, calls with friends who run media agencies and influencer agencies, every article I could find. I vowed to understand how Instagram actually works right now, not the 2020 version. We're a small team at Theo Reads, and before putting serious time into @gettheoreads, I needed real answers, not recycled advice.
One question drove me: does an account have to have a big following to drive real engagement and get readers to theoreads.com? (Answer: No)
Sometime during that week i decided that I would document everything I learned, and share it with authors too. So here it is.
The Instagram algorithm most romance authors are optimizing for stopped working in 2021.
Instagram stopped being about who follows you
The old version of Instagram worked on your social graph. You followed accounts. They posted. You saw it.
What Instagram runs on now is an interest graph. The platform tracks what you watch, how long, what you save, what you send to a friend, what you scroll past. It uses all of that to decide who sees your content, and most of the people who see your content are not your followers. They're readers who have never heard of you, who Instagram has decided, based on their behavior, might want to.
For an indie author with a small following, this is the best possible news. A well-trained account with 300 followers can reach 10,000 romance readers with the right content. The catch is "well-trained" and "right content." Most accounts are neither.
What Instagram actually rewards
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, does a public Q&A most Fridays. He's unusually candid about how the platform works. Here's what he's confirmed.
DM sends. When someone sees your content and sends it to a friend (note: this is not the same as you DMing a friend), that is the most powerful signal you can earn right now. One DM send carries roughly the same weight as fifteen likes in Instagram's distribution algorithm.
A reader saw your content, thought of a specific person, and chose to share it with them. Instagram treats that as a strong endorsement.
The content that earns DM sends in the romance space is content specific enough that someone thinks, "I know exactly who needs this". A quote from your story that captures something true about yearning. A post describing a reader type so precisely that someone immediately thinks of their best friend. Broad and general doesn't get sent, specific does.
Completion rate. For Reels, this is what the algorithm watches most carefully. If viewers drop off in the first three seconds, reach drops. If viewers watch all the way through, and especially if they rewatch, reach compounds. A 20-second Reel where 70% of viewers finish will outperform a 60-second Reel where most people leave after ten seconds. Every time. The first three seconds have to earn the watch. The last ten matter too.
Saves. When someone saves your post, they're telling the algorithm it has future value. Worth about ten likes in distribution terms. In the romance space, saves go to content that's useful for readers: trope recommendations, TBR builders, "if you want this feeling here's what to read" carousels.
What doesn't work
Likes. Mosseri has said this clearly: likes are the weakest signal Instagram still reports. For discovery, they do almost nothing.
Hashtags. Instagram enforced a hard limit of five hashtags per post in December 2025. And within those five, hashtags now function as categorisation signals, not reach drivers. They help Instagram understand what your content is about. They don't get it in front of more people. Three to five niche-specific hashtags, chosen carefully, different for each post.
Follower count. A well-trained account with 300 followers can reach 10,000 people with the right content. Follower count follows from getting everything else right. It's not a lever you can pull.
Posting frequency. Posting every day with content that earns no saves or sends is worse than posting twice a week with something that does.
Why romance readers are actually the right audience for this new Instagram
Romance readers are among the most engaged communities on Instagram. The behaviors the algorithm rewards most, saves, sends, story reshares, real comments, are already baked into how romance readers share recommendations with each other.
"Spicy" appears in nearly 7% of all BookTok mentions. Tropes are how romance readers discover books, more than author names, more than titles. "Slow burn" is a search term. "Enemies to lovers" is an identity readers claim publicly. When a romance reader finds content that captures exactly what they want to read, they send it to someone. That behavior is already there.
The authors who build content around emotional specificity and trope recognition reach readers. The authors who treat Instagram as a book announcement channel reach the people who already know them.
This check tells you if the algorithm knows what you write
Open Instagram. Tap the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen. That's the Explore tab. Scroll through what it shows you.
Romance content, BookTok, trope discussions, spicy reads: your account is classified correctly.
Cooking videos, fitness content, travel: the algorithm doesn't know what you are yet. Your content is going to the wrong people. That's a training problem, not a content problem.
Most authors never check this. They post for months and nothing connects, and the answer is right there in the Explore tab.
Most romance authors make this mistake
They post before the algorithm knows what they are.
If you train the algorithm first, your first Reel goes to romance readers. If you don't, it goes to whoever the algorithm can guess, which is usually nobody useful. The training takes ten to fourteen days of deliberate activity: following the right accounts, watching romance content all the way through, saving posts, leaving real comments on reader accounts. After that, the Explore tab shifts. After that, your content has somewhere to go.
This is what most Instagram advice for authors skips. Two weeks of invisible work before anything happens. Hard to sustain, but the difference between a first post that reaches readers and one that disappears.
Tomorrow's email: Your account is probably set up wrong — the two-minute fix that affects your reach before you post a single thing
Notes
¹ This is possible, not guaranteed. It depends on account training, content quality, and hook strength. What Mosseri has confirmed is that follower count is not the primary distribution mechanism — the interest graph is. A small account with strong engagement signals can reach large audiences. "Can" is doing real work in that sentence.
² He posts at @mosseri on Instagram and Threads. Most Fridays he answers questions in Stories. It's worth following. It's genuinely unusual for a platform head to explain his own algorithm in public, and he does it in plain language.
³ This ratio comes from research by GOSO (2026) based on observed distribution behavior, not an officially stated figure from Instagram. Mosseri has confirmed that sends are the most important signal — the exact multiplier is an estimate. The principle holds. The number is directional.
⁴ Confirmed by Later's April 2026 analysis and Fanpage Karma's study of 1.6 million posts. The earlier limit was 30. Instagram's official recommendation moved to 3–5 before the hard cap came in. Using more than five now actively suppresses reach — it doesn't just fail to help.
⁵ YouScan's BookTok Trends analysis tracked mentions across TikTok and Twitter/X over three months. "Spice" or "spicy" appeared in approximately 52,000 mentions, making up close to 7% of all BookTok mentions in the dataset.