The @GSElevator book isn’t dead yet.
Less than a day after Simon & Schuster said it would not publish the book based on widely followed tweets from @GSElevator, other publishers are expressing interest in the project, the agent for the would-be author of the book told The Post.
John LeFevre — who landed a six-figure book deal from S&S’s Touchstone imprint to write the book that sarcastically poked fun at the image of wealthy Wall Street investment bankers — is expected to visit New York next week and could be meeting with publishers at that time.
“We’ve had interest from other publishers,” said Byrd Leavell at Waxman Leavell, the agent for LeFevre.
Leavell declined to identify the names of any interested publishers but insisted the book, “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking,” would “not be self published.”
“The book ‘Straight to Hell’ is still coming…” LeFevre tweeted on his @GSElevator account late Thursday, hours after S&S canceled the deal.
The 34-year-old Texan seems to suggest he’s going to use some of the S&S advance money to buy drinks for some of his Twitter followers when he visits the Big Apple next week.
“Stay tuned,” he tweeted to his 600,000 followers. “Next week I will tweet locations at various bars in NYC — All drinks will be on Simon & Schuster.”
Finding a new publisher will not be easy.
For one, it is not clear what S&S is going to do about the advance, which was estimated to be between $250,000 and $300,000.
Typically, authors get one third upon signing the contract. If the publisher feels it was misled or cheated, it could demand that the author return the advance.
In rare cases, battles over advances land in court.
At other times, a publisher could opt to cut its losses and let the author peddle it elsewhere and only pay back the original advance if he or she sells it to a new publisher.
S&S declined to comment.
Leavell said, “We still have to work it out.”
@GSElevator had driven Goldman executives crazy as they tried to find out who among them was relating the salacious “office gossip” to the masses.
LeFevre’s S&S deal unraveled this week when a published report put a name and career to the previously anonymous tweeter.
LeFevre, it turns out, never worked for Goldman Sachs.
The would-be author said his tweets weren’t supposed to be those of a real employee but a composite of an everyman investment banker.
Said one publishing executive, “You have an author with a huge credibility problem.”
Goldman, headed by CEO Lloyd Blankfein, seemed to gloat a bit when the S&S deal was canceled.
“Guess elevators go up and down,” the bank tweeted.