Transwhat?

So to start of, we probably need to talk about transmedia literature. With most books, the writing is the real content. The only content in most cases. “The Fifth Anomaly: A Threshold Chronicle” is far from that.

While the book is the primary point of interest for the reader, there are other components to the story. A companion album 10,000 [Ye|Fe]ars was released before the book.

Why before though?

Well for a number of reasons.

1. I wanted the album to be available so that I would already know the URLS to the albums and the songs
2. It allowed me to generate interest in the intellectual property by developing a listener base (even if its small)

I wanted #1 because, in “The Fifth Anomaly” at the end of various chapters (chapter six being the first), you may find a link and a QR code. Those send you to the song on the album that relates to the content you just read.

#2 was not originally a marketing driven concern. It was the idea of trying to generate revenue from as many directions as I could, although it turned out to be the best avenue for the book I had.

Music Marketing

So similar to being a completely unknown author when my first album, Translucid Dreams released in October of 2025, no one was going to find it or listen to it without marketing.

I used un:hurd to pitch two songs onto playlists and one of them ended up on a “Sounds Like Sleep Token” playlist. I launched the second album (the one for the first book) and did some similar work. I took three tracks, pitched them to a few playlists which was hit or miss for the most part. I know of 2 additions.

I normally don’t check these values, but I was going back to spotify to check something for engagement for a new album I was releasing and noticed something unexpected

Relatively normal, slow consistent consumption until January 6th - 8th. What happened there? I started seeing sales from my advertising campaigns on KDP.

Between the 6th and the 8th, I had my first two sales that were un known people. After that, I saw a huge increase in unique users. I went from five to 26 and 27 new users on each day.

The counts aren’t impressive, but what’s rediculous is the stream count change over the period. A 383% increase is redonculous. Now, before I even started looking into what was causing it, I realized I had an opportunity here.

I added a card via spotify that would show up on the artist page for Negative Capability (who I write and publish under) indicating that the book was live on Amazon.

I have seen 6 purchases for the ebook since then that do not correlate to anyone I know or my KDP advertising campaign. It’s anecdotal as I have no way of completely verifying it but I did get this review in December before I even realized all of this

The Source of the Streams

Now here’s where things get interesting. When I started digging into the numbers, I realized it was the companion album for the first book that had all the attention. It had been saved 34 times, added to 25 playlists and had way more streams than my first album.

Then I realized something even more interesting. Some of my tracks were being offered by Spotify’s algorithmic playlists. I released Agnis Tears as a teaser for the second album (for the second book) and 22% of its streams are algorithmic. So something I’m doing is working.

Social Media

I didn’t have a social media presence for Negative Capability so I created one. It’s pretty barebones now. I have a creative I’m going to use for a hypeddit meta advertising campaign for the companion album to the first book.

I did add a linktree to the account which includes a link to the book which has apparently been clicked 10 times.

TLDR;

Successful marketing in a transmedia world helps by having a larger surface area that points people back to your book.

Youtube

Now I’m not a video editor, but I do like AI, and I really loved one of the songs on the album so I tried to render a video for it in Neural Frames.

What I didn’t expect was that it generated almost 1K views in 4 days and pulled in 12 subscribers. I’m not interested in making video content, but thats’ a huge avenue. I did a similar thing. I took those videos, the channel itself and linked it back to the book (just in case).