The Secret (Its All Coming Back To Me Now Book 2)
There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery. The great secret of true success, of true happiness, then, is this: It seems to be a paradox. Do we not know that every man who is unselfish in life gets cheated, gets hurt? Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you — but do not think of that now, it will come back multiplied a thousandfold — but the attention must not be on that.
Yet have the power to give: Learn that the whole of life is giving, that nature will force you to give. Sooner or later you will have to give up. You come into life to accumulate. With clenched hands, you want to take. But nature puts a hand on your throat and makes your hands open. Whether you will it or not, you have to give. The moment you say, "I will not", the blow comes; you are hurt. None is there but will be compelled, in the long run, to give up everything.
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And the more one struggles against this law, the more miserable one feels. It is because we dare not give, because we are not resigned enough to accede to this grand demand of nature, that we are miserable. The forest is gone, but we get heat in return. The sun is taking up water from the ocean, to return it in showers. You are a machine for taking and giving: Ask, therefore, nothing in return; but the more you give, the more will come to you.
The quicker you can empty the air out of this room, the quicker it will be filled up by the external air; and if you close all the doors and every aperture, that which is within will remain, but that which is outside will never come in, and that which is within will stagnate, degenerate, and become poisoned. A river is continually emptying itself into the ocean and is continually filling up again.
Bar not the exit into the ocean. The moment you do that, death seizes you. Be, therefore, not a beggar; be unattached This is the most terrible task of life! You do not calculate the dangers on the path. Even by intellectually recognising the difficulties, we really do not know them until we feel them. From a distance we may get a general view of a park: We feel and really know it when we are in it. Even if our every attempt is a failure, and we bleed and are torn asunder, yet, through all this, we have to preserve our heart — we must assert our Godhead in the midst of all these difficulties.
Nature wants us to react, to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. Then it requires a superdivine power not to hit back, to keep control, to be unattached. Every day we renew our determination to be unattached. We cast our eyes back and look at the past objects of our love and attachment, and feel how every one of them made us miserable.
We went down into the depths of despondency because of our "love"! We found ourselves mere slaves in the hands of others, we were dragged down and down! And we make a fresh determination: Again the soul is caught and cannot get out. The bird is in a net, struggling and fluttering. This is our life. I know the difficulties.
Tremendous they are, and ninety per cent of us become discouraged and lose heart, and in our turn, often become pessimists and cease to believe in sincerity, love, and all that is grand and noble. So, we find men who in the freshness of their lives have been forgiving, kind, simple, and guileless, become in old age lying masks of men. Their minds are a mass of intricacy. There may be a good deal of external policy, possibly. They are not hot-headed, they do not speak, but it would be better for them to do so; their hearts are dead and, therefore, they do not speak.
They do not curse, not become angry; but it would be better for them to be able to be angry, a thousand times better, to be able to curse. There is death in the heart, for cold hands have seized upon it, and it can no more act, even to utter a curse, even to use a harsh word. All this we have to avoid: Superhuman power is not strong enough. Superdivine strength is the only way, the one way out.
By it alone we can pass through all these intricacies, through these showers of miseries, unscathed. We may be cut to pieces, torn asunder, yet our hearts must grow nobler and nobler all the time. It is very difficult, but we can overcome the difficulty by constant practice. We must learn that nothing can happen to us, unless we make ourselves susceptible to it.
I have just said, no disease can come to me until the body is ready; it does not depend alone on the germs, but upon a certain predisposition which is already in the body. We get only that for which we are fitted. Let us give up our pride and understand this, that never is misery undeserved.
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There never has been a blow undeserved: We ought to know that. Analyse yourselves and you will find that every blow you have received, came to you because you prepared yourselves for it. You did half, and the external world did the other half: That will sober us down. At the same time, from this very analysis will come a note of hope, and the note of hope is: If the two together are required to make a failure, if the two together are necessary to give me a blow, I will not contribute the one which is in my keeping; and how then can the blow come?
If I get real control of myself, the blow will never come. We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves.
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We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world. If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? Just think of that. We only get what we deserve. It is a lie when we say, the world is bad and we are good. It can never be so.
It is a terrible lie we tell ourselves. This is the first lesson to learn: You will find, that is always true. Get hold of yourself. Is it not a shame that at one moment we talk so much of our manhood, of our being gods — that we know everything, we can do everything, we are blameless, spotless, the most unselfish people in the world; and at the next moment a little stone hurts us, a little anger from a little Jack wounds us — any fool in the street makes "these gods" miserable!
Should this be so if we are such gods? Is it true that the world is to blame? Could God, who is the purest and the noblest of souls, be made miserable by any of our tricks? If you are so unselfish, you are like God. What world can hurt you? You would go through the seventh hell unscathed, untouched. But the very fact that you complain and want to lay the blame upon the external world shows that you feel the external world — the very fact that you feel shows that you are not what you claim to be.
You only make your offence greater by heaping misery upon misery, by imagining that the external world is hurting you, and crying out, "Oh, this devil's world! This man hurts me; that man hurts me! Numbers vary, but a standard sell-through percentage looks like this:. The number of total buyers drops off after each book, which means that you need to have a lot of people buying book one so that enough people read through the rest of your collection to make a decent profit. Using the metrics above, your sell-through readership would look like this.
That means that if you have people buy your first book, you should see people buy your fifth book. How much money would that net you? What do those revenue numbers look like? Now I know what you are thinking. Well, this is where marketing comes in, and why people often offer discount or free books to people through Facebook ads and other mailing list services like Bookbub.
However, once you have books in a series, then you can start running ads to the first book in your series and stop losing money on your ads. Sell through is the most important metric you have when determining your marketing budget. Without it, you are shooting in the dark. To test your sell-through, you would first need a series of at least 3 books. Then, you can log onto your KDP dashboard or Bookreport if you have it and see how many buyers bought book 1, and then how many bought book 2 about a month later, and how many of those bought book 3.
Back matter content is the information in the back of the book, found in the pages after the book is over.
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Most people end their book, give a short acknowledgement, and then leave it there, but back matter content is one of the most important parts for marketing your book. Effective book marketers utilize back matter to drive people to their mailing list, give extra details about the book and themselves, and, most importantly, give a preview to the next book in the series to help convince readers to buy the next thing.
If you are having poor sell-through now. It might not be the book at all. It might simply be poor utilization of your back matter content. If you use it correctly, it should drive people to your next book. The first thing I will caution is not to have 20 books written in the same series—writing in the same world is fine, but not the same specific series. Because fans burn out on one series.
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More importantly, advertising one series will cause fatigue with the people seeing your ads. If you keep promoting the same series for a year, eventually you are going to exhaust all the potential buyers and your ad costs will skyrocket. This allows you to get all the sell-through of a series without having to worry about burning out the same readers.
However, each of your series should interlock together with weak bonds and strong bonds, and you can drive people to other series through utilizing your back matter content. Download the first chapter of my new book and learn how to create the best work of your life, today. A bond is something that connects one book to another book and one series to another.
A weak bond might be that your new series takes place on the same planet as your previous series, or in the same town.
A strong bond might be that your new protagonist is the brother of the main character in the previous series. Using these weak bonds and strong bonds help bridge series together, and give readers a reason to keep digging deeper into your universe. Because once somebody finishes one series, then some of them will migrate over to your other series to find more information about the world. The nice thing is that once somebody reads three of your books and loves them, you can almost guarantee they will be a fan for life, or until you piss them off. Therefore, if you get them into one three-book series, they will likely check out another series, and another series, and another series, until they have exhausted your catalog.
Readers will keep reading you until there is nothing else to read. Once they have exhausted all your books, they will move on, and it will be incredibly hard to win them back. This is why having many books is so important, because it will keep a reader busy for a long time, and by the time they are done with your backlist, you will have more frontlist books to keep them entertained. Additionally, if you allow them to read twenty books, they will become more devout fans, and the chance of losing them will be greatly diminished.
Now, back to why you should have multiple series set in the same universe. The reason why I like the idea of having four interlocking series is this—you can rotate your promotional calendar every three months, and keep books fresh for people. If you notice, writing four interlocking series of 5 books each will equal 20 books in your arsenal. I personally like to write 3 book series, and make 2 series connect strongly while crafting weak bonds between them as well, so that some series acts as 6-book sets, while still maximizing my entry points into the series while also maximizing my read through.
I will note that romance works completely differently than this. That means each romance novel is technically a stand-alone book, but they use the same tactics we discussed above. Romance authors often take a secondary character from one book and make them the lead in the next book. Christopher Moore and Stephen King both utilize this strategy outside of the romance genre. I want to give you a statistic first. I recommend writing a series 40, to 60, word novels until you build out your backlist.
Martin style novel at 40, words, but you can write a killer single POV story in that length of time. And at the beginning speed is your friend. Again, because speed to market is your friend. Having shorter novels means less editorial investment. If your books are only 40, words, you can create an entire three book series for the cost it takes somebody else to write a ,word novel, and with the same quality level.
It's All Coming Back to Me Now
Your books will be different than that ,word epic, of course, because you are cutting out secondary characters, storylines, and overarching plots that diverge and connect. You need to get in, tell a great singular story, and get out, but if you are okay with that, you can craft an excellent, quick, fun experience within 40, words. There one more reason I like writing short. What becomes hard is focusing on twenty characters, their motivations and goals, and making it all coherent, all in a short amount of time.
Writing short was a tactic I used at the beginning of my career, moved away from, then came back to doing recently because of all the reasons above. You need a formula that you know works every time. I write one book a month. Outlining never worked for me before, but after reading this article about writing a GOOD book in three days, I was a convert. Then, I modified and tweaked the outline to fit my needs, and even put up a sample on my own Facebook group.
This outline gave me the tools I needed to write fast, cogently, and well, while still having a great book at the end which I knew had a market. People like Lloyd Alexander wrote great, prolific books, over a long period of time, and all because they were short. His books tended to be less than 60, words, but people loved them. You need to train your brain to write faster than you ever thought possible.
Most people release books…well frankly without a plan. I see hundreds of books a day where I wonder…where are the rest of the books? Why is this book free? What are they driving me to do? Why did they waste their money?