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Marketing Matters - HotZippy

Updated: Sep 26, 2021


The first site I’m going to hit up isn’t the first site we used or even the first promotion we did. It’s just the one we have the most complete data on.

About the Site:

HotZippy is a site that promotes across Facebook and through a mailing list. They have several specific mailing lists that are based on Genre and one generic “bargain hunter” list.

While they have a romance focused mailing list/group, they aren’t hyper-focused on erotica or new adult romance. They don’t separate out their romance like several sites do, so paranormal, alien baby, historical, new adult, erotica, and contemporary are all mixed up in their listing.

What we did:

Book: The Language of Flowers (second chance romance, sweet contemporary romance) Kindle Unlimited?: Yes Spend: $46 total ($23 for Romance Ebook Deals, $23 for Bargain Ebook Hunter) Promo Start: May 1

We went with the 2-day sale price promo found here

We listed our book on Romance Ebook Deals and Bargain Ebook Hunter. The cost for each of those was $23 per listing. Both came out on May 1 (launch day). And the email dropped at 1pm EST with the FB, Twitter, and Webpage going live around the same time.

Return on Investment:

I’m going to be rating these based on the following: units sold, mailing list grown, new social media followers, reviews, and starting book rank/highest book rank. (Ending determined after either 1 week or when a new promotion launches, whichever comes first.)

  • Confirmed Units Sold: 30 Ebooks, 1 paperback

  • KENP Pages Read: 8291

  • New mailing list members: 2

  • New Social Media Followers: 5 Twitter, 2 Tumblr, 0 Facebook

  • Reviews: 2 Goodreads

  • Starting Book Rank: 54,772

  • Highest Book Rank: 10,532

Takeaways:

This site is really geared for people who are bargain hunting for ebooks or Kindle Unlimited readers and it focuses on that.

It was VERY clear when the email dropped because that is when our book rank started to climb quickly. And it wasn’t due to the launch; due to me having Jury duty on Launch day I couldn’t be out there promoting our new book as much as I wanted to. (They don’t like people to be on cell phones in the courthouse.)

At one point The Language of Flowers entered the top 250 in two of its categories and even broke into the top hot 100 in one category. (As a note, I really think there’s a disconnect on Amazon… apparently Sheikh romances and shapeshifter romances between two white people are multi-cultural/interracial. Who knew?)

However the bump caused by this site meant that Kindle Unlimited Users were more likely to find us. Which works out in our favor. I’ll go into why in a different post.

I would definitely use this site again. My only real complaint is that you can’t do anything to be featured on FB or near the top of the newsletter; they decide based on who-knows-what.

However, the site paid for itself. Which is one of the things I am looking at.

Pros:

Slightly more expensive than some sites. The longer you promote with them, the cheaper the per day cost is. However, the most bang for the buck is on the first day.

The huge spike is when the pre-orders were sent. I counted ebook and paperback sales until 5/6 when something else happened and you can see that that sales were pretty much petering out. (The bump in paperback sales was from a family member buying several, so was not counted in this.)

Many of their readers are Kindle Unlimited and the big bump makes it easier for your book to be found on KU which can be seen on the chart below.

Because of the bump and likely delay in reading, I tracked KU reads for an extra 2 days. But didn’t count May 1 in the numbers listed above. If you are enrolled in KU I really recommend this site.

The newsletter is well formatted and highlights each title well.

Titles are featured on a website as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, in addition to the newsletter.


Website is very descriptive and the sign up process is easy and painless.

Very visible increase in sales on the first day.

Great for stacking promotions. Only requires a 5 day lead time period so I’d recommend stacking this with other promotions to maximize reach. For instance if you have something on BargainBooksy, GenreCrave, or BookBub - buy a listing here as well for that assigned/selected day. There is no “cool-down” period, so if you want to run another promotion 2 weeks after your first promotion finishes you can.

Can advertise on up to 3 sites at once.

Cons:


There is nothing you can do to affect your ranking in the newsletter. The first day our book was near the middle while the second day we were second to last.

The reach is relatively small… less than 4k on the mailing list and about 4500 people on Facebook. At least when it comes to romance. Pixelscroll, a sister site, reaches 44K people on Facebook.

There is nothing you can do to get your cover on the image collage on FB.

Very impersonal.

No discount for purchasing multiple sites at once.

Rating:

4.5/5 stars

We’ll use this site again and we’ll likely stack it with another site/promotion.


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