This has been in the pipeline for some time, especially as I began my career in publishing. Eventually I slid seamlessly into writing full-time, but always intended to start my own publishing company at some stage.

The publishing arm is also called Syntagma Media, so melds seamlessly with existing online publishing.

The idea is to use modern technology to the full and to blend it in with the blogging side of the business. So, that strangely underrated form of publishing, on-demand print production (POD), will be the basis of the operation. Traditionalists find POD a bit odd because it’s often associated with the worst type of vanity publishing. But, in actual fact, it’s just an example of brilliant modern technology that enhances what is sometimes called Personal Media, the kind of new ground opened up by blogging.

When on-demand printing is used by a professional publisher, the results are always excellent. And, where books need constant updating, as with tech or blogging titles, on-demand is crucial. You can update the computer files before each single volume is printed. How up to the minute is that?

The first two books from Syntagma Media will be by yours truly. These have been hanging around for a while, and it’s time I got them published.

First : Nirvaneans. Jan/Feb 2006. This covers my extensive research over many years into the concept of Nirvana, and the people who have experienced it. It contains a number of shortish biographies of Nirvaneans from various cultures, and charts their lives and work in respect of the Nirvanic path.

Second : COSMOSITY. Apr/May 2006. A book that started out as Mind Beyond Brain and shows how the “extended mind”, or Nirvanoception operates in normal life in the West as well as the East. The book suggests that many legends of immortality around the world, including the Holy Grail and the Philosophers’ Stone, relate to a particular state in which the nature of reality is shown to the experiencer. This state is a lot more common than many, including scientists, believe. It is described in detail in the book.

Further titles will be announced later.