Financing for golf book on Javier Arana

[Alfonso Erhardt]

I am pondering the idea of writing a book about Javier Arana, the Spanish golf architect. I have been able to gather all of his personal correspondence with clubs, with Tom Simpson (these letters are very good!!!!), some drawings, plans, photos as a player, etc. I have read George Bahto's magnficient  "The Evangelist of Golf" and was thinking of preparing a book of that sort.

He was quite instrumental in developing golf in Spain through his designs, but given the lack of golf readership we have over here, obtaining financing for a such book is quite complicated.

Any ideas of editorials  that do finance these type of books or have an interest in something similar??

Thanks

[Phil_the_Author]

Alfonso,

Write the book and THEN find the way to get it published. Even for experienced authors with books to their credit, publishers want to see as close to finished product before they will commit to anything.

The second thing you can do is explore the idea of self-publishing the book through a print-on-demand publisher. Believe it or not, for very little expense, depending on who is used, the number of photographs and graphics invovled and size, you can probably expect to pay between $600-1,000 (U.S.). This will produce a pretty good quality book that need only sell between 300-500 copies for you to make a profit over investment.

Produce a well-thought out, nicely written book with good photographs and images this way and you'll be stunned where it may lead.

This is what I did with my first book, Golf for the People: Bethpage and the Black. It came out in May of 2002 and was reviewed in newspapers and magazines nationwide with only one review that panned it! Simply because it was the only book ever written about Bethpage and the Black course's history, with the 1st Open at hand and few nationally really knowing about it, I ended up doing numerous TV, radio & print interviews that otherwise wouldn't have happened. That, in turn, led to my book on the Open, my Tillinghast biography and several others that have been in the works and will soon see the light of day.

Regardless of how it turns out, write it for yourself first and anyone else who may read it and enjoy it is just a bonus!

I can't encourage you enough to write it... The funding for it will follow if you have the passion to do it...

[Tony_Muldoon]

Interesting  thank you

Philip.

Alfonso, IM Mark Rowlinson. A couple of years ago he posted that a publisher he had worked with was looking for more golf books. I'd be very surprised if anyone on here has had a greater number of golf titles published than Mark.


Now can anyone tell me how you find the time .

[Alfonso Erhardt]

Philip,

I agree that writing the book first is the way to go. Just need to get the snowball moving. However, in the case of Arana, although I have a lot of documentation, I still have a lot of research to do by working with the clubs, which is painfully slow.

I hadn't heard about digital printing. I'll have to do some research. Thanks for the tip.

Tony,

I will get a hold of Mark. And no, I don't have the time - just taking it away from sleep hours....

[Phil_the_Author]

Tony,

You asked, "Now can anyone tell me how you find the time?"

It is as simple as writing 1 page a day. Doing that, in 6 months you will have a 180-page book...

I can't guarantee it's quality, but then again, anyone with the drive to write 1 page a day will write more and research more and invest more of their time... I guarantee the quality of what that person writes will be much better...

Alfonso... I can't guarantee you won't lose a LOT of sleep either! 
 

[Alfonso Erhardt]

Philip,

I like your approach, but in the end it is not the pure "writing" that takes time, but also researching....and I have not found a way to research one or tow pages a day (yet!!!!!).

Regards,

[Phil_the_Author]

As you already know, researching is the FUN part of the process! No one who enjoys it could limit themselves to one or two pages a day...