Paradise Under Siege

[dgriffin]

Thanks for the reminder to CB, who mentioned Leon Koziol in another thread.

This is the book over which Leon sued a subsidiary of Amazon.com for a million dollars when they screwed up its publishing. (I don't know if he won. Doubtful, but it was a popular story in the publishing press for some time.)

I always wondered if he got the book published. I checked, and in fact his book is indeed listed on Amazon, so I ordered if from a used seller, probably the POD who prints and sells the books, like mine are published.

(POD = print on demand. Self-publishers use these services to print their books one at a time. There is no up-front cost, but the quality is top notch, in my experience. A buyer of the book ... including the author ... can buy one book or 1,000 books.)

I hope he found a new editor. One of the charges against Booksurge was that they outsourced the formatting and editing overseas to editors who knew very little English, resulting in words that Leon said "were not in the standard English dictionary." I've always believed one should have someone else do their editing, but only if one shares the same language.

Paradise Under Siege (Paperback)

Product Description
The first section focuses on the upper northeast United States and lower Canada where a domestic terrorist conspiracy is building. The second section of the book builds on the terrorist conspiracy, but focuses on the indoor battles in courtrooms, workplaces, and homes.

See the review at:

www.amazon.com/Paradise-Under-Siege-Leon-Koziol/dp/1419606603

[dgriffin]

"Paradise Under Seige," by Leon Koziol arrived and I have read the prologue and first chapter. Hey, this looks like an interesting story! Chapter 1 is a little heavy with description, but I'm not going to play writing critic, and he seems an adequate writer. I'll post more as I get into the book.

[stoney]

He sued for $11 million, Dave. He claims his name as a writer was sullied.

[dgriffin]

Oh, that's right! It was indeed eleven million! I think he settled for an undisclosed amount. Probably a dollar. My copy has the BookSurge imprint, but it has a paste-on ISBN sticker. Since the book came from an Amazon "used bookseller," it may have shipped directly from Koziol's company, Kristen Corporation of Utica. I remember it arrived in an mailer, but I threw out the envelope without noting the return address.

[stoney]

Koziol should have ascribed to the old adage, "You get what you pay for".

[stoney]

Check this out from Writing-World~~

www.writing-world.com/coffee/coffee03.shtml

[dgriffin]

Pretty interesting article, Stoney.

Moira Allen seems a bit naive, maybe purposefully so in order to make her point. And her information is old, although when she wrote it in 2006, I think BookSurge was charging "$1,000 or more" up front. My first POD self-published book was in 2007 and I used Lulu, who today I consider to still have the best quality of paper, etc., although their price is higher. The perfect bound (just like any quality softcover book) is quite nice and you can't tell it from a so called "real" book. That's because even "real" books are becoming POD (Print On Demand) today. You order a book from the New York Times Bestseller list in Seattle and computers whisk your order to a POD plant in Oregon, where a single copy is printed out immediately and sent via mail or UPS to your home the next day. Neither private authors like myself or Simon and Schuster wants to heat and pay taxes on a building full of book inventories. POD is today becoming the defacto means of hardcopy publishing.

I do my books in Word. The cover and any illustrations are accomplished with MS Paint and Gimp, two (relatively) simple graphic arts programs. I do all my own text formatting and steal all the photos from fee-free sources such as my own digital camera or Photobucket. The cover and interior files are then uploaded to either (or both) Lulu and Createspace (Booksurge's successor) and the book is then for sale on Amazon. Total money spent at that point ... zero. I can then order one copy or 2 or 4 or 11 or 1,000 copies and pay the shipping. My latest book, Heaven, retails for $14.50. My price is about half that and I think I've ordered twenty to give to friends and family. And frankly, that was my real purpose in publishing, to get my stories to folks who don't have access to the internet. Self publishing can be tedious, but it's a simple process. I re-issued my second book, Storyteller, last evening with new edits and a new cover. I spent the afternoon reading through all the stories and making new editorial changes, then grabbed a photo of cherubs on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel I wanted, included it in a redesign of the cover, and uploaded all just before supper time. You can see the new cover if you put "david griffin storyteller" in Amazon's search line. (You'll have to click on the old cover and then see both covers as small icons. Choose the new one to enlarge. Amazon's computers are taking a while to update my deletion of the old cover.)

Many POD authors just want to do a quality picture book of their family reunion, for example, or a calendar. Or just experience the fun of publishing their own work. I never try to pawn my book off as though the publishing industry chased me down and offered me thousands of dollars to publish. I always label it as self-published.

Leon Koziol is an attorney and therefore thinks like one. And I think he was just pissed off that he paid a couple of thousand dollars for editorial services to find that, like everything else these days, it was off-shored to people who aren't really familiar with English. Of course, he must have appreciated the cause celebre he created might help sales of his book, or certainly notice.

I'm now about a third of the way into Paradise. Leon's writing is a bit muddy, but the plot is clear enough. He spends a lot of time in trying to set up the reader, because he wants us to appreciate everything the "enemy" is doing, without telling us too much at first about the identity of the terrorists. Turns out it's the Indians, and they are using other terrorists as well as the casinos as part of their plot to regain their lands. Not a surprising tale from Koziol, of course.


I just realized I can show you the new Storyteller cover here:

www.windsweptpress.com/images/storyteller cov csp sm.jpg[/img]

[stoney]

That picture is beautiful.

I also read on another site that one must pay extra to BookSurge for editing, & supposedly Koziol didn't; therefore ended up with a book that included his own mistakes. Who knows? I tried to find out what the outcome was but couldn't, which makes me think it's still in litigation. My question is: Where is there $11 mil. in damages? That's a stretch, to say the least.

If the book is that good, why couldn't he get it published by a legitimate publisher?

[dgriffin]

If the author wants, he or she CAN pay for editing and formatting services, but that's hardly necessary if you're at all any good. I do my own and consider that part of the craft of writing. An acquaintance happens to be a free lance editor and he's read my stuff and makes suggestions from time to time, but I seldom make any but minor errors. (Not counting my forum posts!) Editors today don't do any kind of rewrite, unless you're a major selling author.

Why a major publisher may not have been interested in Koziol's novel: I'm no literary agent, but I think Paradise Under Seige wouldn't compete well in the market today. And that isn't a slam against the book, necessarily, because there are so MANY books on the shelves today and so MANY being written that getting your novel noticed and published is quite difficult, and that's an understatement. Also, if it happened to hit the bestseller lists, Koziol would reap MUCH more financial benefit from self publishing the book, assuming the POD process could keep up with Amazon orders.

I've always thought his cherubs were Michaelangelo's way of depicting creation as the act of a Storyteller. They seem to be listening, don't they?

[stoney]

I see the cherubs in wonder & thought. Provocative.

[dgriffin]

I'm halfway through the novel, and I have to say I'm getting a bit tired of Koziol's prose. It's certainly not for the faint hearted. Here's a description of a cove at the edge of a lake.

"Varied conifers rose up on three sides of this cove, ejecting monstrous trunks, including decayed pines strewn across its remaining exposure. Access to the solitude now being enjoyed by the boat occupants could only be achieved by navigating over and around these natural obstacles exhibiting a dual existence in their partially rooted connections with a declivitous shoreline and the former tree tops now anchored inversely within the impending recesses of this cavernous lake."

Now to me, a writer's job is to quickly slide the thoughts down your gullet without you ever realizing you just swallowed it. S-m-o-o-t-h. Your eyes and brain shouldn't stop to realize you're reading. It should be like gliding down a slide at the playground, not like tripping down a root strangled mountain trail.

"... navigating over and around these natural obstacles exhibiting a dual existence in their partially rooted connections with a declivitous shoreline ... ' is like pushing through heavy brush.

In my humble opinion, of course.

[stoney]

Oh my Lord. My eyes ache just from reading that entry. No wonder he had to self-publish it: Nobody else would.

[dgriffin]

But the story so far isn't that bad, although I personally prefer not being placed on a boat with 5 fairly accomplished not-so-young women who are re-uniting after some years. This forces the author (he thinks) to write cute, chirpy dialog, filled with smart ass cracks thrown around by stereotypes who are all physically attractive. Like a reunion of cheerleaders whose pompoms have wilted.

I wonder if Koziol gave any thought to casting a group of dour, but serious librarians in the role of the women. Or German teachers, who would have simultaneously darkened the mood while providing some comic relief. "Das ist eine Flasche Ketchup sie tun Zärtlichkeiten, fraulein."

[stoney]

Feb 2, 2010 13:20:49 GMT -5 @dgriffin said:

" Access to the solitude now being enjoyed by the boat occupants could only be achieved by navigating over and around these natural obstacles exhibiting a dual existence in their partially rooted connections with a declivitous shoreline and the former tree tops now anchored inversely within the impending recesses of this cavernous lake."

Talk about a run-on sentence...

[stoney]

I think the author was just demonstrating how many multi-syllabic words he knows.