How a World Cup Run Turned Into Real Sales for a Children’s Book App

A few weeks ago, something happened that wasn’t on anyone’s roadmap: Cape Verde went on a run in the World Cup. Draws with Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia through the group stage, a spot in the knockout rounds, and then a loss to Argentina that ended it.

For most businesses, that’s just a headline. For Doreen’s app, it was something else entirely — because her app and book are built around Cape Verdean language and culture, and for a few weeks, more people than ever were paying attention to Cape Verde.

This post is about what we did with that moment, and why it’s the clearest example yet of what I mean when I talk about repurposing your book.

Quick context, if you’re new here

Doreen is one of my bootcamp students — a self-published children’s book author with no technical background before we started working together. Her print book teaches Cape Verdean Kriolu. Over the course of my Game Apps Course, she turned it into an app, and since then we’ve been growing it together: a landing page and Facebook campaign to build her audience, and now, a new feature that let us respond to a live event as it was happening.

Why push notifications, and why now

Before this, the only way to reach someone who had Doreen’s app was email. Email works, but it has a delay — someone has to open their inbox, see the message, decide to click. If something time-sensitive is happening, that delay costs you.

So we added push notifications — the alerts that show up on your phone’s lock screen even when the app isn’t open, the same way a text message does. Once someone has the app installed, we can reach them directly, in the moment. This time, that moment was a Cape Verde match about to kick off.

The campaign, match by match

Once Cape Verde started playing, we used both email and push to stay inside a moment people were already excited about. Not “buy the app now” messages — short language lessons, cultural notes, and reminders of what’s inside the app, timed to land right before or during a match.

After the nil-nil draw with Spain, an email went out to 1,241 people on the list — 28.2% opened it, 1.29% clicked through. By the Uruguay match three days later, the list had grown to 1,262, with a similar open rate, and push notifications were brand new — reach was still small, too small to draw much from yet. By Saudi Arabia, push reach had grown to 56 for the pre-match reminder and 64 for the final score. And right before the Argentina match, the one that ended the run, the list had grown to 1,368 people: 30.26% opened the email, and push reached 132 devices — roughly nine times what it had reached three weeks earlier.

Two honest notes on that data. Push’s click-through rate ran well above what’s typical for push notifications, and it grew nearly tenfold in reach over three weeks. Email’s opens stayed strong throughout, but its clicks slid a little with each send — worth watching if we run something like this again.

Why a print book could never do this

Here’s what I want you to really sit with. A paperback on Amazon can’t send an email the morning of a match. It can’t push a notification to someone’s phone. It can’t even know a World Cup is happening. It’s finished the day it’s printed — useful, but completely static.

Doreen’s app isn’t just a different format of the same book. It’s a living product that can respond to the real world in real time. Her book taught Kriolu on the page. Her app could feel a moment happening in the world and show up inside it, the same week, on her readers’ phones. That’s not a small upgrade. It’s a different category of thing entirely.

What it added up to

Putting it all together — the landing page and ads that grew her audience beforehand, plus the full World Cup campaign — here’s where Doreen’s numbers landed in June, the month the whole run played out.

The free version of the app was downloaded 1,048 times. On the paid side, 30 purchases came through, two later refunded, for a net of 28 — split close to even between full-app purchases and single chapters. Purchases came in from well beyond our original targeting too, including France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Net proceeds for June came in around $251, with buyers paying closer to $369 before Apple and Google’s cut. Compare that to April’s $179 net and May’s $157 net — June was the strongest month yet, and it landed right in the middle of the one live event we didn’t plan for.

Every one of those numbers came from a different lever, and every lever only exists because the book became an app.

If you’ve published a children’s book

This is what I mean when I say you’re probably sitting on more potential than you realize. Grab the free blueprint to see how this could work for your book.

I’ll keep documenting Doreen’s numbers as they grow — good and bad — because the proof matters more than the pitch.

Doreen’s app:

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