One of the aspects of writing a book I most looked forward to was releasing it in my family’s country of origin, Brazil.

I’d spent years daydreaming about what that would feel like, returning to my homeland bearing the gift of hard-won knowledge to share with the people who had given me so much. 

Criando Um Segundo Cérebro came out in July 2023, about a year after the US release, and I decided to travel to Brazil the following month for a press tour to promote it.

In this blog post, I’ll recap our strategy for launching the book in Portuguese and Spanish, the results we achieved, what we found to be most effective, and what I learned.

Strategizing the launch in Brazil

Our strategy in Brazil unfolded in three stages, each one building on the one before:

1. Host or participate in a series of media interviews and events (in person and virtually)
2. Funnel all the attention generated into a dedicated Instagram account and WhatsApp community
3. Use those platforms to launch my book and online course BASB Foundation in Portuguese

Preparing for launch

I hired a Project Manager just for the launch of this book since I knew there would be a lot to coordinate and execute. I found someone in my network who was Brazilian and could handle all communication in Portuguese, which I also speak.

The first thing we did was segment our existing email list to find our “true fans” located in Brazil. Based on their IP address, there were 2,145 of them, out of 81,315 subscribers total at that time, which means 2.6% of my audience was based in Brazil.

Next, I created a WhatsApp Community (essentially a group with multiple subgroups within it) and invited all 2,145 subscribers to join. A couple hundred of them did – representing the most dedicated followers of my work there.

The WhatsApp Community became a central place for me to share updates, ask for help promoting content, announce major milestones, and receive feedback on my plans and ideas. I was blown away by the energy and enthusiasm this group of supporters demonstrated. They shared detailed unboxing photos, posted their recommendations and takeaways, boosted our own social media posts, bought extra copies for their friends and colleagues, and gave me tons of helpful advice about how to approach the Brazilian market. I’m incredibly grateful for their contribution to this launch.

The third and final step of preparation was to schedule a 10-day trip to Brazil, at my own expense, which would be used to extensively promote my book’s release in Portuguese.

Stage 1: Generate attention through media interviews and events

The goal of stage 1 was to drum up as much interest and enthusiasm for my book (and the broader idea of Second Brains) as possible.

I participated in 10 events, both online and in person, including:

• An Instagram Live with a major creator interested in PKM
• An academic-focused event with CRIE, a lab at a public university in Rio de Janeiro specializing in network science, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the study of knowledge management
• Two book signings hosted by my Brazilian publisher, Sextante, in each of the major cities of southern Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
• Two Second Brain Meetups I hosted myself, in Rio and São Paulo
• A Notion Meetup organized by the local chapter of Notion enthusiasts
• A breakout session at Fire Festival, the largest conference on online education in Latin America, hosted every year by the online education platform Hotmart
• A major podcast, which we filmed in person at a studio in São Paulo
• A virtual Q&A hosted by the Brazilian Society of Knowledge Management.

For all these events, we took lots of pictures and in a couple of cases even hired a videographer to fully document the experience via short-form video, such as in this example:

Through my publisher, we also received exposure through multiple media outlets, including MIT Sloan Review Brasil, Você RH, O Globo (the newspaper of record in Brazil, which I immediately sent to my mom!), Valor Economico, national radio program CBN, Saber Viver (a lifestyle magazine in Portugal), and Fast Company Brasil.

Besides the traditional media above, we had a legion of independent content creators who were kind enough to produce videos and summaries about me, my book, and my work, on a variety of social media platforms.

Stage 2: Capture the excitement in the new Instagram and WhatsApp accounts

As we were building all this anticipation, we asked everyone to follow our brand new Instagram account, with content only in Portuguese. We haven’t been very active on Instagram in the past (it’s our smallest social platform in the U.S.), but I knew it was by far the most dominant platform in Latin America and would be the ideal home base for our efforts in Brazil.

I knew that events (both in-person and virtual) create “spikes” of attention, but we’d need a way to capture that attention and maintain a longer-term relationship with people.

In the 6 months since its creation, our Brazil Instagram grew from zero to almost 3,000 followers. We posted photos and videos from all the events I participated in, creating a central repository documenting the efforts we made in the country for anyone to see in the future.

I also continued asking people I met and collaborated with to join the WhatsApp group, so we always had a single place to easily communicate and coordinate with them. 

Stage 3: Launch the Portuguese online course

The third and final stage was to create and launch our flagship online course, BASB Foundation, for the Brazilian market. The goal was to make this training as widely available as possible there and to recoup some of the investments we made for the book launch.

I decided to use an AI-powered tool called HeyGen to produce the new course, which accomplished three functions: 

• Translate the actual text from one language to another
• Generate the audio of me speaking to that text, matching my tone of voice
• Change my lip movements to match the new words

Although I speak Portuguese, this saved me several days’ worth of filming and gave me a chance to verify the quality of the service in a language I spoke.

Here’s an example of the results:

Although the HeyGen team was highly responsive and did an excellent job supporting our needs, this endeavor ended up being a lot more complex than we expected. The initial translation was impressive but contained some errors and inconsistencies that we had to correct through several iterations. Here are some challenges we faced:

• HeyGen’s AI-generated translation usually sounded too formal
• The tone of the AI-generated audio was hard to adjust
• Questions were a challenge and the emphasis wasn’t always accentuated in longer sentences
• Very long sentences were difficult for the AI to translate while preserving the meaning
• Transitions between sentences weren’t always fluid and often felt weird
• The speed of the spoken words had to vary in order to match the lengths of sentences between languages, sometimes resulting in abrupt speeding up or slowing down

We also realized that launching a course in another language requires a lot more than translating videos. There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be built: from a landing page to onboarding emails to marketing to customer support. 

Assuming your goal is to make it possible for someone who doesn’t speak English at all to access the training, you have to translate 100% of the infrastructure around the course and make sure it works in their country, which is hard to test when you’re not there.

That said, using Hotmart as our course platform (the most popular one in Brazil) made it much more feasible. They provided a variety of tools and features we needed to make the launch possible, all easy to use and designed for the Brazilian market. Their team helped us at several crucial points, and I recommend them for anyone making a foray into Brazil.

The initial launch of the Foundation course in Portuguese was unfortunately quite disappointing, with only 13 sales totaling a few thousand dollars. I’m not sure why even our existing audience wasn’t receptive to it, but I suspect it’s because the $250 price point is still quite high for the Brazilian market, and there is a lot of free content on this topic (both in Portuguese and English) being published continuously that largely satisfies the demand.

For a full recap of how we localized our BASB Foundation course for the Brazilian market, read the recap written by our Director of Marketing here.

Was it worth it?

We sold about 6,000 copies of my book in Brazil in the first 3 months, and 9,500 in the first 6 months. That’s quite a phenomenal outcome! I believe we’ve set the stage for the book to be a perennial bestseller there for years to come.

Looking at the financial picture, we made about $10,000 USD between the book advance and course sales, and have spent $16,000 USD between contractors, SaaS services, and travel costs. I hope over time these two new income sources will match and eventually exceed what we invested to create a presence in Brazil.

Speaking of the less tangible, subjective rewards, it was without a doubt one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. At the book signing in São Paulo, my entire extended family came out to see me, including people who hadn’t seen each other in years. It was like a family reunion!

Seeing the incredible enthusiasm of the many people who came out to support me, and hearing story after story of how my ideas changed their lives, is something I will never forget. Not to mention the feeling that I gave back to my homeland and provided a reason for hope and progress in a country that is so in need of it.

Launching in Mexico and coming full circle

About 7 months later, in March 2024, I had the chance to do it all again – this time for the Spanish release of my book under the title Crea Tu Segundo Cerebro.

Although the book was being released in Spain and throughout Latin America, I decided to do the press tour in Mexico because of my special connection to that country. I had written most of the book proposal while living in Mexico City with my wife Lauren in 2019. It felt like the whole project was coming full circle to where it began.

Here’s a short video with some highlights from this amazing experience:

One major difference this time around was that my Spanish publisher, Reverte, had generously hired a local PR firm to handle all the interviews, media appearances, and events in Mexico City, where I spent a few days dedicated to promotion. I still had to pay for my own travel, but in Brazil, the cost of local staff had been the single biggest expense, and it was helpful to have them cover that cost.

This also meant that almost all the press this time would be from traditional media, via the PR firm’s network. I was fine with this because I had learned from my time in Brazil that I could access digital media outlets easily on my own. What I can’t do is gain the credibility that mainstream media provides, which is more essential in Latin America than in the U.S.

We followed up with much the same playbook as before:

• Segmenting our existing email subscribers (we found there were about 5,498 subscribers located in 20 Spanish-speaking countries, or 4.7% of my audience)
• Inviting them to a Spanish-language WhatsApp Community (a similar number, about a couple hundred, decided to join, and they became an essential sounding board and chorus of supporters for everything we did)
• Creating a new Instagram account to centralize and promote all our Spanish language content and media mentions (this account has less than 100 followers so far, a testament to our focus on traditional media versus digital-native media)
• Participating in as many events as possible to generate interest and create media mentions which could be further shared to boost the book’s credibility

With the PR firm’s help, I took part in 12 interviews, including several newspapers and magazines, digital publications, a popular podcast, and two TV interviews (including the one below live on air in Spanish!).

Another big difference from the Brazil launch was that I kicked off this press tour with a paid speaking gig at a major conference, at La Festival de Las Ideas in Puebla. This not only started things off with a bang but essentially paid for the entire trip so we broke even from day one. 

Overall, we’ve sold 2,675 copies of my book in Spanish for the initial launch. We’ve made $16,000 USD from Spanish-speaking markets and spent about $7,000, for a profit of $9,000. Taking that into account, our holistic efforts across Latin America have already reached breakeven.

We are planning on translating our course into Spanish (and other languages) as well, using all the best practices we discovered the first time, which hopefully will grow the return on our efforts as well as make these ideas more accessible throughout Latin America.

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