One great thing about doing a Feature Interview with Brad Klein is that … it needs no introduction! If you are reading this post, you are familiar with Brad Klein’s work.

Another great thing is that we are free to jump around to all kinds of topics, as Brad (like Paul McCartney  ) wears numerous hats including author, course critic, historian, Ross expert, consultant, turf guy, etc. In addition, he runs one of the Big Three rankings.

Thus, within Feature Interview No. 3, we bounce from gaining Brad’s perspective on publishing golf books to Red Lawrence’s classy design at Desert Forest to Sebonack to challenges facing private clubs to Golf Week’s rankings to Old Macdonald.

From coast to coast, any or all of these subjects are bound to be of interest. In that regard, this Feature Interview is a lot like Rough Meditations, still one of the easiest golf books ever to read.

Cheers,

It's interesting that par 5s seem to be Brad's favorite holes for their risk/reward options yet he, like many of us, is not known to be a bomber of the ball.

Great question, Mike.

It's meant that news moves a little faster -- hard to distinguish GCA from the whole Website phenomenon. Here it's additionally a matter of separating out fact from rumor. I still try to save a lot of my judgments and detailed comments for Golfweek, but I am always amazed how far and how much some folks travel to see golf courses. It's been a healthy reminder of the passion that people bring; and sometimes a frightening reminder of the same. It certainly was a lot easier to write about architecture 20 years ago.

It also means that anyone in the media writing has to keep ahead, work harder, and do more detailed analysis, since a lot of the quick judgments and word on the street news arrives through GCA before any other medium. It also keeps me on my toes more because the slightest mistake or misstatement (not in matters of opinion but in facts) gets noticed right away.

Mark,

I hope it's made me a better reporter. I was always pretty wary, but warier is always better, esp. in this business, where you learn to discount 2/3rds of everything you hear and trust only about 1/2 of what you see.

Having said that, I think Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" award to net users is a bit fanciful and over the top. The Web has a democratizing impact by making things more open and more subject to public scrutiny. It also blows the cover off of false pretenses and media public relations imagery -- which has caused some big name golf course architects a lot of embarassment, as it turns out.

But the lack of journalistic standards and of evidence sifting on the Internet generally and on GCA in particular mean that there is an awful lot of noise masking little that's actually substantive or of significance. It's like a Wild West shootout of self-appointed sheriffs. Some of them aim straight and want to uphold the law; many others prefer just to brandish an armed weapon and fire away to celebrate themselves.

The organized press has plenty of faults and self-imposed limitations, but the open license of the Web, while making for good theatrics, doesn't always make for worthwhile theatre.

But the lack of journalistic standards and of evidence sifting on the Internet generally and on GCA in particular mean that there is an awful lot of noise masking little that's actually substantive or of significance. It's like a Wild West shootout of self-appointed sheriffs. Some of them aim straight and want to uphold the law; many others prefer just to brandish an armed weapon and fire away to celebrate themselves.

The organized press has plenty of faults and self-imposed limitations, but the open license of the Web, while making for good theatrics, doesn't always make for worthwhile theatre.

Nice comment Brad.  Theatrics versus Theatre!  Perhaps another comparison would be the shelf-life (or half-life) of reality tv versus documentary tv.

It is also much easier to be critical than to be correct.

James B

At the end of his second GCA interview Brad states that he doesn't intend to get into design consulting.....gues things have changed! Good on ya, Brad. Better go get that liability insurance.

One of Brad's strengths in addition to his strong commitment to classical design principals is his sense of realism regarding the challenges presented in the modern game. Reading his three interviews in order shows a maturing of his attitudes from which we are fortunate to benefit.

Mike, the Whistling Straits book had been acquired by Wiley's predecessor, Clock Tower Press, and was basically focused on the 2004 PGA Championship there, with a significant pre-sell to the American Club Resort. The manuscript needed considerable work, as it was basically a collection of newspaper-style, contemporary narratives of the championship, tied to the larger story of golf there. There was a lot of interesting material, but I never got to see the photography, which would have been key.

I'm not sure I've had that many "ideas" for books. The Ross thing sold itself to a rather modest publisher, Sleeping Bear (Clock Tower's predecessor). The same publisher actually bought a book I wrote in 1998 on golf and the media, which completed manuscript I'm still sitting on because the essays were all derived from my "iGOLF" days when I wrote "A View from the Couch" and it probably would not have much of a shelf life from the late-1990s. (note: timing isn't everything, but it's a lot of the issue with books)

The two club histories I've done were privately arranged, so they don't count. At this point, I'm trying to work with a book agent, who would serve as an intermediary, and have sent off proposals for three books that I think are worthy projects. This is my effort to be even more crassly commercial. We'll see. The books I've done have not exactly been best sellers, though the Ross book has a pretty decent shelf live and does fairly well esp. for an $85 price tag (which is subject to standard industry discount but still very pricey in the book world). But the value of wriitng architecture books -- besides the idea sand the imagery of the book -- is that it moves you into a different category of writer and enhances your reputation and opportunitities in other ways (i.e. "branding.")

I'm sure any writer in any field can basically tell you the same story, namely that about 1/3 of your good ideas get to book length projects, and about half of those get published. What I will tell you is that there is no relationship between being able to write the occasional or even the frequent article and writing a book. You don't write a book -- you write day-by-day, page-by-page, and mainly seem to rewrite, and if you are unwilling to give up lots of golf games and reruns of "Law and Order" you'll never get the manuscript done. You better like to write.

The other thing about doing books is that you have to be very promotional, very persistent (I almost wrote "aggressive"), not just in selling the ideas and writing the thing but in designing it and then, post-publication, selling it every chance you have at book signings, talks, radio interviews, wherever. It's a business, as well as an art. In the great literary scheme of things, these books are very modest endeavors. I am amazed how tough a business it is, and how good the writers are who succeed. It helps to be young and to catch on early, which is certainly not my case.

My bet is that the business of books is, in many ways, like the business of golf course architecture. You have to have a love of the basic craft, and you also better be a very good marketer.

Dan, you might as well ask how much does a golf course cost -- it varies dramatically per project. I've seen club history proposals for 2,000 copies that budget everything in for $50,000, though I think a more workable figure with good color and high quality paper and good photography and design imagery is much closer to $135,000.

Writers usually work for an upfront fee (advance) plus percentage of royalties down the road -- with the advance counting against the first part of the royalties. Here, too, it varies, with some very small publishers offering advances of $5,000-$10,000 and larger ones offering 3-6 times that. (We're talking architecture books here, by the way, not literary blockbusters). With most internally published club histories, the writer gets paid once, regardless of sales. Otherwise, the checks come in 2x a year.

Commercially published architecture books vary in terms of sales. Some of Sleeping Bear/Clock Tower architecture books sold as few as 2,500 copies. 6,000-10,000 would be considered good and certainly profitable. The Hurdzan book has probably sold 25,00 copies. The Cornish-Whitten book has probably sold 100,000 copies over the years. Doak's "Anatomy" sold very well, in part because it was an easy access size, well-written, unique when it came out and not expensive -- probably in the range of 20,000-30,000 copies.

Production costs of an architecture book will also vary widely depending upon color vs. black and white/quality of paper/size of pages/design detail/binding and number of copies issued.