Part 8 – Building a Marketing Ecosystem

This is Part 8 of a series by B.A. Bellec on using AI to edit his novel Cobalt Lungs. Start with the [Series Introduction].

How AI slashed the cost of experimenting, turning the novel into source material for a whole marketing chain, most of which failed, and a few of which stuck.

There is a workflow to my marketing process:

Book → Song → Music Video → Articles → Social Media = Marketing Ecosystem

Before AI, I thought about marketing as something that happened after the book was finished or as you were nearing the finish line. AI changed that perspective. Suddenly, the book could become songs, videos, articles, social media posts, and visual concepts far faster than I could have created them on my own. The novel wasn’t the end product. It was the source material, and it all happened in near real-time.

The biggest thing AI changed wasn’t my ability to write marketing copy. It changed my ability to experiment. A song idea that would have sat in my phone notes for three years suddenly became a finished track in a weekend. An article idea became a draft in an afternoon. A visual concept could be tested in minutes instead of days. Most of those experiments went nowhere. A few became meaningful additions to the Cobalt Lungs ecosystem. The reduced cost of experimentation was the real breakthrough.

What I am getting at, AI can be used to build a marketing ecosystem where your book is the source material and all kinds of fun are branching out from it using all the various AI platforms to assist you, along with a bunch of existing software like Canva, Audacity, Instagram, and YouTube. All software is fantastic to help with content creation, and content helps people stay engaged. 

These articles right now. They are marketing. I am selling myself and my story by opening up about my process. People don’t like doing marketing. People don’t like seeing obvious marketing. The trick to good marketing is to make it useful. If it teaches someone something or helps them solve a problem, they often don’t experience it as marketing at all. Readers like living in worlds and learning, so sell them on your world and then teach them something. That might keep them engaged. Might get them to click another link. Read another article. Ultimately, maybe they are interested enough to buy your book.

I think where you want to take a pause, the more advanced the AI task, the greater the environmental impact. ChatGPT is probably the least power-intensive of the AI platforms. The text-based input and output are fairly low-bandwidth. Creating pictures, songs, and videos is where the computational power spikes hard. The environmental and ethical questions did not disappear when I moved into music and images. If anything, they became more pronounced. Generating text is one thing. Generating images, songs, and eventually video requires those data centers we all hear about. Plus, the ethical concerns around where it was copied from also increase. Words are words. They are pretty universal. A painting is often extremely unique to its creator. That is a tougher reconciliation as to how AI was trained. That reality forced me to become selective. Just because I could create something did not mean I should.

I always try my best to only use what I need. I would love to make a graphic novel one day, as Pulse and Cobalt Lungs are oozing with visual and atmospheric style. I just don’t know how to use OpenArt well enough yet, and I have great concern about the training methods. We all have lines we draw in the sand. I just felt it wasn’t the right time for me to try a graphic novel or video, but I am not saying never, I just need to learn more about the impact and process before I proceed any further.

When it comes to marketing, AI didn’t help me market a book. It helped me build a world around a book. I still have to get these things online and in front of people. I still need the KSA to use the other platforms, or everything we built would just sit on my computer, lonely, unloved, and wasted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B.A. Bellec is an award-winning Canadian novelist, songwriter, and music video producer whose work blends cinematic storytelling, emotional atmosphere, and deeply human science fiction. Drawing from an education in film and a multidisciplinary creative process that merges music, prose, and visual symbolism, his stories explore themes of survival, memory, grief, identity, and the search for meaning inside collapsing systems.

Known for emotionally immersive worlds, recurring symbolic imagery, and a style that balances intimate character work with large-scale thematic ambition, Bellec creates stories that feel less like traditional narratives and more like lived emotional experiences. His current project, Cobalt Lungs, expands beyond the page into a companion concept album, combining literary fiction, atmospheric worldbuilding, and music into a unified creative universe.

COBALT LUNGS

Station Eleven meets The Road with the psychological containment and systems tension of Silo.

A deadly airborne spore has transformed the world into a collapsing maze of quarantines, sealed cities, and desperate survivors struggling to adapt. In the ruins of Vancouver, musician Maddy fights to hold onto her humanity inside an overcrowded refugee shelter while scientist Ethan isolates himself nearby, deep underground in a self-sustaining silo where routine has replaced emotion. As society fractures and survival becomes increasingly brutal, the two are pulled toward each other in ways neither of them fully understands. Atmospheric, intimate, and emotionally charged, Cobalt Lungs is a post-apocalyptic story about isolation, survival, and the dangerous hope that can still burn at the end of the world.

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