Author interview: Patrick Smith

Patrick Smith’s 2007 memoir, Extra Innings takes a honest and amusing look at life on the senior circuit. No, not the National League, but the amateur baseball leagues that fill the towns across the country.

Smith, a resident of Baltimore, took some time to answer a few questions about the nuts-and-bolts of working with McFarland on his project.

Bookshelf: How did you come to pick McFarland as your publisher?

Patrick Smith: I pitched the idea to [them] when I saw them at a pop culture conference in New Mexico a few years ago. (My wife is a professor of that kind of thing and I was along for the ride.) They liked the idea and encouraged me to pursue it. Meantime, I talked with a literary agent about it and she really liked the idea, so I kind of left McFarland.

But the more time I spent with the agent, the more frustrating the project became. So, after about a year of New York agent hassles, I got a note from McFarland asking if the book was still happening. So, without an agent, I signed with [them] and delivered it six months later.

Bookshelf: Who was your editor at McFarland and what was that experience like?

Smith: I worked mostly with Natalie Foreman. at McFarland. I had very little contact with anyone editing the book. Since it was my first book, I didn’t know what to expect. I did a fair amount of pestering and was pretty much always told “take it easy. Everything’s under control.” So I sat politely. [But] the McFarland people really love baseball, which made working with them fun. At various times throughout the process, I’d get these wonderful and inspiring letters from Robert Franklin, the president of the whole outfit. He’d say things like “let’s have fun with it.” It seemed such a departure, after all that business with the agent.

Bookshelf: Did you find they did a lot of editing, compared to the original manuscript?

Smith: I’d say very little editing was done. And that kind of bugged me. I sent the manuscript to a couple close friends to read before I submitted the final to McFarland. They did most of the substantive editing. I can see a word or two here and there that [they] changed, but that’s about it. The book also has a handful of typos in it; that drives me nuts. I can’t catch all my own typos.

Bookshelf: I noticed some of the language was “saltier” than your routine McFarland title. Was there any point where you were at odds with your editor about something you wanted in that she wanted out, or vice versa?

Smith: Saltier, indeed. I daresay I set a McFarland record for “F-bombs.” To their great credit, they never blinked and never asked me to tone it down. The salty language comes mainly from the dialog. A first-person book where the narrator swears a lot when talking to the reader is, to me, tiresome. I thought the language was important to the book’s tone. But I didn’t want it to drift into territory where the words no longer had an impact. And, to a lot of the anecdotes, the language is really key. The scene in which the head groundskeeper at Memorial Stadium completely tears my head off wouldn’t be the same without the awful language.

Bookshelf: How would you rate the overall publishing experience?

Smith: …Since this is my first book, I have nothing to rate against. I was so thrilled to be published at all that McFarland could have waterboarded me and I’d have thanked them for it. In hindsight, there are things I’ll change next time — more contact with the editor, for example — but really, [they were] great.

Bookshelf: Do you have another baseball book in you?

Smith: I have another book in me, but I don’t know if it’s baseball. The next one will have a little baseball in it, but it’s not a “baseball book.” But I’m really enjoying writing about baseball and the Orioles on www.bugsandcranks.com. That started as kind of lark and has turned into something kind of big.