From Existing Fans to New Buyers: How Doreen Pena Grew Her Children’s Book App With a $100 Ad Campaign
Doreen Pena’s children’s book app made its first $500 in under 30 days — almost entirely from people who already knew her. Her existing readers. Her email list. People who’d already decided, one way or another, that they trusted her.
Good problem to have. But it raised an obvious question: what happens once you run out of people who already know you?
This post is a continuation of Doreen’s journey. If you haven’t read the last update, start here: From Subscribers to Sales: How Doreen Pena Earned Her First $500 With a Children’s Book App.
In this update, I want to walk through what we did next — building a way for total strangers to find Doreen’s app, and testing whether a small paid ad budget could add anything on top of the organic audience she’d already built.
Quick Recap
Doreen self-published a children’s book teaching Cape Verdean Kriolu. We turned it into an interactive app with an email signup built in. That got her 300+ subscribers in under a month with zero ad spend, then her first $500 once the full app launched.
All of that came from people already connected to Doreen — her existing readers and list. Great start, but it’s a ceiling. To grow past it, we needed a way to reach people who’d never heard of the book at all.
Why We Built a Landing Page
Up to this point, the app itself was the only thing we were pointing people to. That’s fine if someone already trusts you enough to download an app — but a cold stranger scrolling Facebook isn’t going to do that on the first touch.
So in March, we built a landing page: conversationalkriolu.repurposechildrensbooks.com. It’s built to earn a little trust before it asks for anything.
- Near the top sits a short video of Doreen herself, so before anyone’s asked to do anything, they’ve already met the person behind the book — something an ad alone can’t deliver.
- Further down, the page backs that up with testimonial videos and written reviews from people who’ve already gone through the guide, the book, or the app.
- Then comes the actual ask: a free beginner’s guide to Kriolu, in exchange for an email address. Low commitment, real value, nothing to buy.
- Once someone joins, they’re automatically dropped into an email sequence that keeps delivering value over the days that follow — more language tips, more of Doreen’s story — before we ever introduce the app and paperback as the next step.
It’s the same principle that worked inside the app — the email list — just moved one step earlier, with more trust built in, in front of a colder audience.
The Facebook Campaign
With the landing page live, we ran a Facebook campaign in April sending traffic to it. The targeting logic was straightforward: there’s a global community of people with Cape Verdean heritage who didn’t grow up speaking Kriolu fluently and want to reconnect with it. That’s a real, findable audience — and it’s one Amazon’s algorithm was never going to surface for a print book buried in a language-learning category.
We targeted the actual Cape Verdean diaspora — Cape Verde itself, plus France, the UK, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the US — and inside Cape Verde, we could see engagement broken down by island: Santiago, São Vicente, Sal, Fogo.
We didn’t get it right on the first try. Over about three weeks, we tested a handful of ad variations, watched what people actually engaged with, and dropped what didn’t work. The version that won spoke directly to the frustration we lead with on the landing page: “Always wanted to speak Cape Verdean Kriolu but didn’t know where to start?”
For around $100 total spend across the whole testing period — a daily budget of $3 — here’s what the winning ad delivered on its own:
- Reach of over 60,000 people
- 162,500 views
- 5,536 post engagements
- 1,376 visits to the landing page, at a cost of five cents each
If you’ve only ever sold through Amazon, this is the part worth sitting with: with a print book, you’re at the mercy of whoever happens to search the right keyword. With an app and a landing page, for less than the cost of a few coffees, you can go find your audience directly, see exactly who’s responding, and double down on what works.
What It Added Up To
Here’s the number that actually answers “was this worth it.”
April — the month the ad ran — brought in 19 purchases across the App Store and Google Play, split almost evenly between the two. About two-thirds were the full app, the rest single chapters. Geographically, just over half came from the US, with the rest spread across France, Portugal, the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden — a pattern that lines up closely with where the Facebook campaign was targeted.
That whole three-week testing process cost about $100. April’s net proceeds alone came in around $179 — after Apple and Google’s cut. What buyers actually paid was closer to $220.
Not every one of those sales traces directly back to that one ad — some came from the wider list and audience the page built. But the honest version is still a good one: for roughly $100, in a single month, this channel returned somewhere between $179 and $220.
Here’s the part that matters most if you’re thinking about ad spend as a one-time cost: we didn’t run any new ads in May. No fresh spend at all. But the leads from that campaign were already moving through an automated email sequence, and the reviews piling up on the app and the landing page kept doing quiet work of their own.
May’s numbers: still around $157 in net proceeds, closer to $193 in gross terms, across 18 separate sales — for zero additional ad spend.
The number isn’t really the headline, though. The headline is that this entire channel — cold strangers, found through paid targeting, landing on a page that didn’t exist three months earlier, nurtured by an email sequence and word of mouth long after the ad budget ran out — simply didn’t exist for Doreen as a print-only author. It does now, and it’s still paying off.
Why a Print Book Couldn’t Do This
A landing page, an ad campaign, an email capture — none of those are exclusive to apps. You could build all of that around a print book too. What’s different is what’s waiting on the other side of that page.
With a print book alone:
- The most that page can ever do is send someone to buy a paperback
- A single sale, with no way to see who bought it or what happens next
With the app:
- That same landing page leads to in-app purchases trackable in real time
- A dashboard shows exactly who’s buying and from where
- It’s a product we can keep adding to without printing a new copy
None of this replaces the paperback, either. A reader who finds Doreen through the landing page, watches her intro video, or reads a review might just as easily go buy the print book afterward — that path stays wide open the whole time. The book gave Doreen something worth marketing. The app gave her a second product, and an audience that can find either one.
That’s the whole point of repurposing: not trading the book in, but giving it a second way to be found, and a second way to earn from the work already done.
What’s Next
June came in ahead of May — and part of that is tied to something that played out over the last few weeks: Cape Verde’s run in the World Cup, which came to an end against Argentina. That doesn’t make the story any less worth telling. If anything, it means the next update gets to show the whole arc, start to finish — exactly how we used a brand-new feature in the app, plus this growing list, to react to a real-world moment in real time. That one surprised even me.
Want to Explore Doreen’s App for Yourself?
- Download on iOS (App Store)
- Download on Android (Google Play)
- Visit the landing page
- Paperback (Amazon)
Want to Try This With Your Own Book?
You can:
- 👉 Download my free guide here to get started
- Explore my tutorial videos
- Reach out if you need guidance
- Let me know what you’re curious about
And if there’s something specific you’d like me to cover next, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.
This is still just the beginning.
