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The Publeconomist

A young economist, navigating the future of publishing

• Twinks who buy drinks? (11/19/09) [View | Hide]

  I recently wandered across this Boystown-based (Chicago) blog: Twinks Who Buy Drinks. Cute stuff, check it out. If you’re not sure what a twink is, it’s slang in the gay community for a young, thin guy. The term also usually carries some implications of ignorance, naivete, and sexual promiscuity. The author’s pitch is that he’s a twink who is self-sufficient and can buy his own drinks, rather than try to latch onto every older guy in Boystown nightclubs. What do you think? A good book idea? Even though there are so many thousands of books published in the U.S. every year, I’m still a firm believer that there are always new stories to be told. Experience evolves with changes in lifestyle, technology, and cultures, and that’s what all stories are really about, right? Experience? So, I have fun pouring over the web for book ideas, and to see how people are expressing themselves. The first couple of chapters for our upcoming erotica novel are coming together, and we’re preparing our first title for its upcoming release. Once the website is up and we’re releasing titles and getting submissions from authors, this blog will be a lot more hopping! In the meantime, we’re working behind the scenes to get inGroup Press fully up and running. I really can’t wait to share our first three titles with you, as I have a lot of passion for these projects. I’m very active on Twitter, so if you haven’t already, please check us out here. I promise you’ll at least be entertained, if not occasionally educated! Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• Response from Red Room (11/12/09) [View | Hide]

  Tonight I received a comment to the post “What does LGBT stand for?”, which was published yesterday on our website. The CEO and founder of RedRoom.com, Ivory Madison, responded on behalf of her company. The comment can be viewed underneath the original post. First off, I hope that Red Room didn’t take any offense to my comment. I never criticized or belittled the writer in the article for not knowing the meaning of LGBT. The article explains that my shock is due to the fact that I feel so surrounded by the LGBT community, that sometimes I forget that there are people who aren’t familiar with our ubiquitous terms. I agree with Ivory Madison, that friendly outreach should transcend all types of people, even (and especially!) to little towns in Ireland. That’s the beauty of a website like Red Room. I was able to post a blog on submissions requirements for LGBT books, and reached someone who might have otherwise never heard of LGBT publishing. How cool is that? I definitely plan to continue using Red Room, and encourage anyone with a passion or interest in literature to check this place out. When we use social networking websites for positive reasons, there’s so much amazing outreach and interaction that can take place. Warmest, Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• Networks (11/11/09) [View | Hide]

  Hey everyone, just a quick note to check out our “Networks” page, listed above next to About Us and Submissions. As inGroup Press begins its long journey from crawling into walking (or from that screaming-little-baby phase where we’re waving our fists in the air and throwing up on everybody, into crawling), we’re going to be branching out to create online presences in lots of areas. So far, we’ve been most active on Twitter, and our corresponding Fulgencio Milano has been posting a lot on Yelp. As soon as we get our logo and the new website is ready, we’ll be strengthening our appearance on places Myspace and Orkut. Our Facebook page is also on its way. So, if you happen to be on any of the same website as we are, check out Networks page and add us! Thanks again, Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• What does LGBT stand for? (11/11/09) [View | Hide]

  RedRoom.com is an online social networking community for writers, publishers, editors, etc., but it’s mainly for writers who want to share their work with others. Writers maintain an online presence through blog posts, articles, or even uploading a book or short story. It’s a pretty cool site! inGroup Press has an account on RedRoom, and I’ve lately been posting on our RedRoom Blog. After I posted our submissions guidelines as a blog post, I received a strange comment: “mnn………how about the writings of a regular person in a regular life with some dips and some highs, some light and darkness but always, always reality?” I’ll admit, when I first saw this I was slightly stunned. Maybe our submissions guidelines are worded differently than many other publishing companies, but the guidelines don’t ask for material that’s unnatural or that isn’t real. Was this writer mocking me? By making an account on RedRoom, was I reaching out to a group of writers who aren’t ideologically in line with inGroup? I kindly explained that we’re an LGBT publishing company, and avoided the use of that dangerous word regular. I explained to this writer that we publish LGBT material, and can’t be everything to everyone, otherwise we’ll lose touch with our market. And, it’s still hard for LGBT voices to be heard in the mainstream, so I like to think that I can help LGBT writers who may be turned away by other publishing companies. And then the reply came, in a single sentence: what does LGBT mean? Of course my submissions guidelines looked strange! I don’t know if I was more shocked that this writer didn’t know what LGBT stood for, or disappointed that I’d grown so close to the term that I never recognized the need to expand the acronym. Needless to say, our submissions page now expands the acronym within the first sentence. I’m not sure why I was so surprised that a native English speaker had never heard the term “LGBT” before. I’m constantly exposed to this term, every single day, and I had forgotten how many people have absolutely no exposure to “LGBT.” I commented back to the writer, and explained more about what LGBT meant, and why we’re a LGBT publishing company. I never got a response, but at least I felt better, knowing I’d explained the acronym to someone. And more importantly, the reasons why it’s important to represent and publish this material. It’s unhelpful when people like Tom Ford say that they don’t consider themselves gay, because they don’t like labels. Gay isn’t a label, rather, it’s a word, with powerful implications and history. For someone like Tom Ford, his sexual identity and practice might be protected from social impediments because of his stature, celebrity, and wealth. But what about gay couples in Rhode Island who were hurt by the awful veto this week by the state’s governor? Whether or not I’m protected from political and social consequences of being gay, I shouldn’t pretend like sexual identity doesn’t matter. I’m proud that I’m gay, and that I’m doing things to help LGBT people. As long as millions of dollars are being spent by organizations like Focus on the Family to seize our rights, then I will call myself gay. And I ask that any census please count me as a gay man, living with another gay man in a same-sex partner household. By refusing to associate ourselves with words that we consider to be labels, we’re simply making ourselves invisible at a time when LGBT people in our country are still fighting for rights and acceptance. Not to mention, it’s a slap in the face to the people who’ve spent their lives achieving us these rights. If you’re inherently gay, then acknowledge it. It doesn’t mean you have to tell everyone, or anyone. But if you’re Tom Ford and an interviewer asks you whether or not you’re a gay man, then just say you are. It doesn’t take that much effort. And it may avoid an unfortunate situation where lots of your young fans will begin to separate themselves from the larger LGBT movement. Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday. Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• Writers — find inGroup on Red Room (11/5/09) [View | Hide]

  inGroup Press on Red Room Check it out! Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• A new website and our first teaser (11/5/09) [View | Hide]

  Happy Thursday morning! I’ve been up since about 5 AM… all that sadness from the Phillies loss, you know. Hah, not quite… though I’m sad to see my home team lose in the World Series, I’m proud that they made it so far. New York City almost lost its Mayor this week, so could you imagine if it lost the World Series also?! Tragic. I’ve been hard at work with our hard-working designer, who is developing our logo and website. I can’t wait to reveal the final product, and am so excited for what lies ahead. As I’ve mentioned, inGroup Press is launching with three titles. Two are literary fiction, and one (the stories of the “Boston Couple” … more on them later) is a blend of ‘designer erotica’ and fascinating non-fiction, and will be released through our Symbiont Books division. Very soon, inGroup Press will initiate a 30-Day Countdown to the release of our first novel. We’re going to post teasers in this blog and on Twitter, so each day you’ll get to see a little bit more from this book. We’ll also be using Scribd.com to post free chapters for e-viewing. In the meantime, here’s a teaser summary of our first novel (we’ll be releasing the title of the book when the 30-Day Countdown begins). Four young women abandon their city homes on the most random of suicide journeys: a road trip towards a forest known for its mystery and cult intrigue. One of the women is a journalist, who has joined in secret to write and profit from the experience. But as she grows closer to the other women on the trip, she struggles with a new question. Will she abandon the girls to die for the sake of a book deal, or will she enter the forests with them, and engage a series of nightmares that threaten the possibility of her return? Deep, spooky stuff. I love modern gothics. Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• Is marching worth it? (11/2/09) [View | Hide]

  I have to thank my Editor for this one… I’ll let you see for yourself. Congressman Barney Frank speaks candidly about political activism, and the recent Equality March in Washington DC. What do you think? Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• Way to go indie booksellers! (10/29/09) [View | Hide]

  Kudos to any small bookstores that tried to take advantage of the awful Amazon/Wal-Mart/Target pricing wars. Check out this Wall Street Journal article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Miguel Bustillo. It’s sad that some of these small booksellers could get titles cheaper from Amazon than from the actual publishers! Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• How do you define a LGBT book? (10/29/09) [View | Hide]

  This article over at Red Room sparked my interest in this little debate. As a publisher of LGBT material, I too have struggled over our submission guidelines. Why should a gay author not be able to publish with inGroup just because they write books without any LGBT characters or themes? It can easily seem unfair, right? My best answer to this is that LGBT publishing companies make connections within the LGBT community that better suit them to sell this genre of books to potential readers. A book without any LGBT elements, no matter how awesome it is, doesn’t really have a place in a bookstore like Giovanni’s Room. Gay readers go there to read books with gay themes. Otherwise we could just go to Barnes & Noble if we wanted to search a wider selection of new fiction. I’m also planning on being pretty lenient as far as the LGBT theme goes. One of the points I make in our submissions page is that an author’s book doesn’t have to focus entirely around LGBT characters. As long as the book has some substantial LGBT presence, then I’m happy to read it. But a book about two turn-of-the-century male cowboys who don’t have sex with each other isn’t for inGroup, because I simply won’t have the proper relationships to sell or market this sort of novel. I also think it’s important that we (as a community of publishers, writers, and readers) spread LGBT themes throughout modern literature. This is the reason that inGroup Press is a LGBT publishing company. It’s vital that we put more of our literature and characters out there for the public to absorb, so that we can educate those who are totally unfamiliar with our community, and with what it means to be LGBT. Sure, B&N doesn’t have a big LGBT section yet, but as the Internet revolution has proven, you don’t need massive retailers to sell novels anymore. So if anything is certain, then this is really the time for Internet-savvy LGBT publishers to spread our fiction and non-fiction to the reading public. Record for using “LGBT” in a blog post? Probably. Let me know what you think, and check out the above article at RedRoom.com. Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

• A Review by Fulgencio – The Drake Hotel in Chicago (10/29/09) [View | Hide]

  He’s at it again… this time chronicling his stay at the famous Drake Hotel in Chicago, IL. Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

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Starstruck

Comment left on: 11/19/09 9:59 PM Thanks for the add homeboy. You two are the cutest couple on dlist. And you don't even appear to be evil!!

attractivegr

Comment left on: 11/15/09 2:34 AM Thanks for the add request cutie! _Stavros_

jokk18

Comment left on: 11/14/09 10:10 AM thanks for the add i love ur pics!

ninjajon

Comment left on: 11/13/09 10:38 PM you guys are too cute

untamedchap

Comment left on: 11/13/09 1:47 AM Took me a while to figure out the costume. ;) I liked it before I knew what it was; probably cause you guys are HOT! lol =-P Hope all is well with you guys. Drop me a line sometime.

floosie

Comment left on: 11/11/09 12:25 AM lol i'd be lying if i said i read through your profile thoroughly, but the group "I'm gay + I read" made me laugh. i read, too. though lately it's less "fine literature" and more of whatever's left over.

theguy0789

Comment left on: 11/9/09 10:47 PM hey hey, and thanks mister :)

alright001

Comment left on: 11/9/09 9:09 PM great photos in your album!! great costume :) hope the publishing house is doing well!

Artom

Comment left on: 11/9/09 5:53 PM awwww i love your costumes they made me laugh :)

stylebyjd

Comment left on: 11/9/09 2:54 PM thanks for the request added you. Whats going on in your life. Anything exciting?