Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop FAQ

Q. I knew there was a market for gay porno, but I did not want to write that kind of thing. Now there seems to be a market for a better class of gay literature. I understand a friend of yours in Austin sold Travels with Lizbeth to Fawcett for you. So how about an introduction to your agent?

A. Apparently I have given you the wrong idea of how the publishing business works, and I am very sorry to have done so. The impression that hardly any publishers will look at unsolicited MSS is essentially correct, but very misleading if left at that. Initial contact with publishers is now made with a query letter. A successful query letter draws a request for chapters and an outline and eventually for the whole MS. When the MS arrives at the publisher's through this process, it is not unsolicited. So if I or someone else has advised you that publishers will not look at manuscripts sent to them without prior contact except from agents, that is, in general, true, but hardly means that an agent is necessary to sell a book. In fact, every author I know sold his or her first book him- or herself, and so did I.

Also, you have got the facts of the publication of Travels with Lizbeth wrong. When I was homeless in Austin, working on the book in an abandoned building, I sent chapters for safekeeping as they were done to someone I knew in San Francisco. Although he was from Texas and had lived in Austin at various times, we had never met in Austin. He edited a number of erotic magazines at various times. We met through the mails when I sent a story to one of the magazines he worked for. He did not merely take an interest in my work. Editors in this line usually have two, three, or more titles to produce each month, and the certainly do not have time just to take an interest in someone's work. Rather, he could use my material. Editors in such a situation survive by developing a stable of regular contributors, and of course when they change magazines, as he did several times, they take their writers with them. So as congenial as my relationship with that editor has become over the years, it was first, foremost, and always at its core fundamentally a business relationship.

And of course, we had an agreement on a commission before I sent him even one chapter. On the one hand you might suppose he was doing me a great favor--and it certainly was a speculative venture on his part--but after all, two of my books had already been published and he knew very well the quality and amount of material I could turn out. He did not make a leap in the dark; it was a gamble, but the odds were not really so long. Insofar as he has a pro bono interest, in me and his two other clients, it is in preserving gay erotica and the authors who have paid their dues in producing it.

He sent unedited chapters of my book to The Threepenny Review and the editor bought as much as she could get hold of. Harper's reprinted an excerpt of one of those chapters and from then on there was a waiting list of publishers who asked to see the whole MS. The MS was clearly a rough draft. When he sent the MS to St. Martin's the editor there express some doubts that I could be successful in redrafting the work. My friend assured them that I could -- an assurance he could make because he had edited my work for many years. Even so, I did not get a contract for the book, but the chance to redraft it for St. Martin's on speculation. And of course, neither my friend nor I had anything to do with the Fawcett edition. St. Martin's licensed the paperback rights to Fawcett according to the terms of our contract.

Now my friend is a busy and successful novelist in his own right. He has been very explicit about not wanting any more clients. I might prevail upon him if I discovered an author of one of the classic erotic series who had dropped out of sight because I know this is the type of writer he especially wants to encourage.

Once again, I want to apologize for giving you a mistaken impression. Naturally I am grateful to my agent for the work he has done on my behalf, but sometimes when I express that gratitude, I guess, I don't always make it clear that it was not a bolt from the blue, but was the culmination of a long-standing business relationship. He did good work. He represented me well. He often went above and beyond the call of duty. He invested his time, energy, postage, long distance calls, and much else in me when there was no certainty of his ever seeing any return on that investment, and I hate to think of where I would be today without him. No doubt he exerted himself on my behalf out of a spirit of philanthropy, in part. But he did not just find a homeless writer on the street and decide to take me under his wing. He did not just run across my work and decide to take an interest in it. Indeed, that is hardly ever the way things happen in the publishing business.

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