Turning Goodreads into Animal Crossing for readers: a small French publishing-world team used one party to get 18k installs

My Booktown is a French reading tracker: log what you've read, earn rewards, and spend them decorating an illustrated cozy study. It bought no ads and got no media coverage. It relied on a launch party in Paris and dozens of French book bloggers posting in the same week, and it went from zero to over 10,000 installs in about a week. A month and a half after launch, daily installs have dropped from over 3,000 to around one or two hundred. Below: what it did right, which parts you can copy, which parts you can't, and whether doing it again in another language is worth it.

A Tuesday night party in Paris

Sep 22, 2026 was a Tuesday. That evening My Booktown held a launch party in Paris for a room full of French book bloggers. There was an activity, food, small gifts to take home, and bloggers recommending books to each other.

That day, a TikTok creator with 33k followers, @clarathvenet, posted a video captioned with one line: "This is My Book Town, you can add me: F66MEN". That string of letters was the 6-character friend code in the app. The video got 7,034 views and 115 comments, and the comment section was mostly people swapping codes. The same day, @miraslittleworld_ shared her study, which she was "still filling in," and posted her code too.

Three days later, on Sep 25, a blogger with under 3,000 followers, @elza.is.reading, posted a recommendation that specifically said "completely voluntary recommendation (aucune collaboration haha)" and asked people to use her invite code to "build a pretty little community together." It got about 40k views and 2,941 likes (TikTok, checked 11-06), the highest-view My Booktown video I could find.

Over the next week, Android installs went from dozens to 12,000 (third-party estimates, same below).

What it actually is

Opening the app shows a hand-drawn little study. You scan book barcodes to log books, start a timer to read, and when you finish you get rewards to swap for furniture and seasonal decorations (autumn and Halloween items have been released). The study also has a cat named Booky. Around it are badges, cards, personal challenges, group readathons, and a bookshop map. Friends are added by a 6-character code. The illustrations are by illustrator Eva Corbisier.

App Store reviews describe it more clearly than the store copy does:

J'ai l'impression de jouer à Animal Crossing mais pour mes livres. (It feels like playing Animal Crossing, except I'm playing with my books.) — App Store France, 09-22

Depuis que je l'utilise je lis tous les jours. (Since I started using it I read every day.) — App Store France, 10-13

How it makes money: free to download, with the free version limited to 1 study. Adding more studies and doing big challenges requires Premium, listed on the App Store from 5.99 euros and on Google Play with in-app purchases from $6.99 to $64.99. The most common complaints are about this too: "Without a subscription you can't add more studies, which is a shame" (09-23), and "big challenges are often Premium only" (10-24). The complaints also show the paywall sits right where users really want something, and 11-02 someone wrote "I already bought the paid version."

The company behind it is Lexi, an SAS registered in Alfortville, southeast of Paris. It was registered in May 2025 with a share capital of 15k euros. The official business scope reads plainly: "developing a library application that rewards reading through targeted challenges with physical and digital rewards." Several founders introduced on LinkedIn come from publishing. The company page has 408 followers and lists 1 employees, and one developer describes themselves as "one of two developers." In Oct 30 the company filed a new capital-increase document with a subscriber list, so it may have just raised a small round (inference; amount and investors unknown).

Where the volume comes from

They started building the audience months before launch. By May the website had a "Booktown Letter" waitlist collecting emails through Mailchimp. Launch-day reviews are full of "waited months," "used the beta for a month," and "following since the start." One is very specific: a promo video was seen two weeks earlier, and the app was installed three hours after launch.

The party plus same-week posts was the main channel. In the two days after the party, a wave of "I went to the launch" content appeared on TikTok and Instagram. Emmanounette's line on Instagram is the most representative: "Stop using old Goodreads, come to My Booktown." The beta testers were bloggers themselves, so on launch day they already had studies they'd been using for a month to film.

Friend codes turned every video into acquisition. From Sep 22 through the end of October, #mybooktown was full of videos in one format: show the study, then "add me as a friend + code." Even App Store reviews include codes. Users posted videos to show off, and the friend code quietly turned showing off into recruiting.

No evidence of paid ads found. It doesn't show up in the Meta ad library. The install curve looks like a launch spike followed by natural decay, not sustained paid acquisition. No mainstream media coverage. On X, searching "booktown" over the past two months returned 0 results. Almost nobody outside the scene knows about it.

Numbers: a strong launch, not sustained growth

(Google Play installs, third-party estimates, 11-06)

iOS took off earlier in France. Launch was Sep 20 (store date), with 112 ratings averaging 4.6 stars, mostly concentrated from Sep 22 to Oct 5. From Oct 28 to Nov 6 it added only 3 ratings. The iOS France Books Top Free chart sat between #11 and #26.

What happened with Android? Android's surge came a week after iOS's. From Oct 1 to 4, daily installs climbed from 3k to 12k in three days. The likely explanation is the Android version scaling up combined with a second round of blogger videos (inference; the trigger wasn't found).

On the Play France Books chart, the Top Free ranking slid from #10-30 at 32 down to #11-06 at #63. The Top Grossing position stayed steady between #43 and #50, but don't overread it: the France Books Top Grossing bar is very low, and the app ranked #48 beside it is Gleeph with 685k installs. So the position only shows that a group of people is paying, not how much revenue there is.

Who it's competing with

Reading trackers are already a red ocean, and the cozy gamified angle already has players:

In France, the combination of "native French + illustrated decoration + community management" really is unclaimed: local players Gleeph and Babelio are tools or communities. But the concept isn't new. Cat's Library came out a year earlier, and no one has run a launch as well-executed in a local scene. As of 11-06, I haven't seen anyone copying My Booktown.

What you can copy and what you can't

What you can copy is the product and the playbook:

• Take a tool people find dated (here, Goodreads) and rebuild it as a pretty, decoratable, shareable version. Screenshots are the marketing material.
• Anchor the paywall on collecting: the free version gives one study, and once your books outgrow it, you have to pay to make room.
• Build the friend code into the product, so every shareable video carries a recruiting hook.
• Release seasonal decorations on a schedule to give long-time users a reason to post again.
• Launch rhythm: waitlist, bloggers into beta, an offline party, and dozens of mid-sized bloggers posting in the same week.

What you can't copy is the people. The founding team came from publishing and already knew these bloggers, which is how they turned the launch into an in-scene event and got people to say "completely voluntary recommendation." That comes from relationships, not money. If you have no such relationships in Italy or Germany, you'll be building them from zero.

There's also a question it hasn't answered itself: what keeps growth going after the launch? Daily installs fell from 3,500 to 190, and the free chart is trending down. Whether seasonal updates and challenge mechanics can hold up retention and payments is unclear right now. Reviews already complain that "the challenges are always the same ones" and "not enough decorations," which suggests users consume content faster than the team can make it.

If it were you

B. Worth a try. Redo this "cozy reading study + same-week blogger launch" in an open language and the opportunity is there, but there are two clear weak points: first, the ceiling is low. France's run got to nearly 20k Android installs, not hundreds of thousands. Second, the original hasn't yet shown it can keep growing after launch.

Who it's for: a team of 1 to 3 people with one member who can draw, or who can keep an illustrator on retainer. The illustrations are the whole product. Ideally the founder is already active in a language's BookTok or Bookstagram scene, or has worked in publishing or bookstores, and can recruit 20 to 30 mid-sized book creators. Italian, Spanish, German, and Brazilian Portuguese have big reader communities and no local version of this product (my inference; 11-06 hasn't seen similar products in these languages gaining traction).

Who it doesn't suit: people who can only write code and don't know any bloggers. This kind of product's volume is concentrated in launch week, and without people hyping it that week there's nothing. Anyone aiming at the global English market (Cat's Library, Focustown, and StoryGraph are all there; you won't beat them). Anyone counting on organic App Store search ("reading tracker" is long taken by older apps with millions of installs).

How to build it: start with only three things. Book entry (barcode scan plus local catalog data; the most common complaints are "can't find the book" and "scanned volume 2 as volume 1"), reading timers, and a decoratable study. Add import: French users specifically ask to import from Babelio, LivrAddict, and Excel, and your version should likewise let people migrate from Goodreads and local platforms. Limit free users by number of studies, sell Premium at 5 to 6 euros a month, and sell seasonal decoration packs as in-app purchases.

How to acquire users: follow its rhythm. Open the waitlist 3 to 4 months before launch, bring 20 to 30 reading bloggers into beta, and have them fill their studies before launch. On launch day, hold an offline event (one bookshop evening is enough) and ask everyone to post the same week, each with their own friend code. Then release a decoration set every season to give bloggers a reason to film another video.

When to start: open the waitlist and start beta before mid-December to make a January launch. New year is when reading goals and annual reading challenges peak, and reading bloggers are all posting "how many books I'll read this year."

Signs you've misread it: ① My Booktown's Android daily installs fall below 100 by late December and France's Play Books Top Free drops out of the top 100, meaning this playbook only produces one spike, in any language; ② your pre-launch waitlist is under 1,000 people, or you can't get 10 bloggers into beta, meaning you lack the relationships it had, so don't force it; ③ Cat's Library or Focustown launches Italian, Spanish, or German localizations and runs events with local BookTok, taking the open space; ④ conversely, if My Booktown opens a second language after its funding, the team has run the numbers and sees it as worth it, and you should move faster.