Syntagma Media is proud to announce a special online pre-publication event : Steve Newman’s fictional biography of Ernest Hemingway, Going The Other Way From Home is now appearing in its entirety in twice-weekly chapters for Syntagma’s Web Network Magazine.

Steve Newman is a playwright, director, actor, historian, and freelance writer, who lives and works in Shakespeare’s Stratford. In 1997 Steve, along with two other Stratford playwrights, founded The Bird of Prey Theatre Company, which is dedicated to promoting new work. Since that time BoP has produced fourteen new plays by writers from around the world.

Steve writes regular features for such magazines as Writers’ Forum, Book & Magazine Collector, Family History Monthly, The Dalesman, Citizen Culture, and The Writer.

Going The Other Way From Home is a fictional biography of Ernest Hemingway that tries to show how his future actions were influenced by his and his family’s past. It is often told from Hemingway’s point of view and from those who came into contact with him, and uses actual historical narrative to help weave a fascinating account, not only of one of America’s greatest writers and men, but also of his times and the people he came into contact with, such as Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Max Perkins, Morley Callaghan, J.D. Salinger and of course his wives, Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh. Along the way we shall absorb many another story — so be prepared for a few surprises.

This publication follows in the great tradition of pre-publishing books as serials, made famous, of course, by Charles Dickens. Don’t miss this one.

The ever-enterprising Darren Rowse has launched a new service for bloggers seeking blog jobs and blog owners looking for bloggers. It has just been launched as I write and already has a clutch of tasty openings for blog authors.

The opportunities are classified under : Corporate/Business, Blog Network, CoBlogging, Podcasting and Miscellaneous.

Darren writes: “This service would suit companies looking for bloggers, blog networks, individual bloggers looking for CoBloggers or even bloggers looking for medium to short term guest bloggers while they take a vacation.”

The cost of listing a job is normally $100 for 30 days, but there’s currently an opening special of $50 until September 5.

Syntagma has booked an ad for a sailing author — our endless quest — but it hasn’t appeared on the list yet. We’ll see if the Problogger magic can make the impossible doable.

When Weblogs Inc closes down a blog on a specific topic, you know something’s going pear-shaped in that particular field.

WIN has announced that its Digital Photography blog has been “retired”, though apparently not yet placed in its home for golden agers.

We too have had trouble finding effective authors for our Digital Camera Latest site, which will continue on a shared arrangement after Labor Day in the States.

By contrast, Darren Rowse’s prolific Digital Photography School continues to make waves, even meriting an article in the Wall Street Journal. What are we to make of this?

Coincidentally, it’s on Darren’s Problogger site that Jason Calacanis explains the move in the comments on the post: “Even the Big Boys Call it Quits”.

WIN is consolidating its blogs because :

a) the big ones are sold out on advertising and need more inventory
b) the small ones are having a hard time becoming money makers for us because advertisers want blogs with > 1M pages a month.

They want to focus on the big winners that advertisers can’t get enough of — not just Engadget, but also Autoblog and others, those in the range 500k to 3m pages a month. The aim is get them to 5m pages/month when they will start to mop up a lot of incoming deals that have no place to go at present.

“Bottom line: we are in phase two at WIN, and phase two is about scale. We knnow we can make money, the question is can we scale this business to a LOT of money. Like move the needle at AOL money–and we’re on the way.”

If these numbers seem out of reach of smaller operators that’s because WIN is now part of AOL and draws traffic from a global media conglomerate. I don’t think those of us who have yet to achieve that massive advantage should throw in the towel in despair.

But despite the different league these stats come from, there’s a lot of good sense in the principles used. Consolidation is a good way to add strength cheaply to promising mid-range blogs.

Where acquisitions will cost you money, consolidation can save you money while at the same time boosting mid-performers into that magic >1m PVs range which expands your saleable inventory to a different kind of advertiser.

Here at Syntagma, in our tenth month of operation, we’re growing our page views at around 300pc a year, and that rate is accelerating. We’re happy with that — few businesses get that kind of growth. But Jason’s words on consolidation will be top of the agenda next time we consider the road ahead.

In an intriguing media experiment, The Washington Post is offering to sell advertising space on commercial blogs on a revenue-split basis. Blogs accepted into the beta program will be rotated in a box situated bottom right on the WashingtonPost.com front page. With 8 million readers a month that could be a useful place to be.

Syntagma has thrown in a few blogs to test out the system. However, the designer of the scheme, Jeff Burkett, in a comment on Problogger, has already stated what we all thought : “Not only is pricing going to be a challenge, but the volume of blog submissions has been very high and it is a lot of information to sort through.”

Here’s part of the description of the scheme :

The Sponsored Blogroll is an index on the washingtonpost.com homepage that promotes bloggers who are participating in a partnership with the advertising team of WPNI. If you are a blogger or blog network looking to expand your readership and advertising, our Sponsored Blogroll program can be the boost you’ve been looking for.

Here’s how it works:
A link to members’ blogs will be featured in our Sponsored Blogroll index, giving your writing promotional space on the washingtonpost.com home page and giving you an introduction to an audience of 8 million readers monthly. At the same time, our hardworking sales reps will help connect your signature musings with the huge number of advertisers we deal with every day who are looking for the next big, slightly-outside-the-mainstream idea. …

We are primarily interested in blogs that focus on Technology, Business, Health, Automotive and Travel topics, but welcome submissions on any subject.

It will be interesting to see what kind of advertising results from this. Non-commercial bloggers may have to sharpen up their expertise unless the Post makes it easy for them. Clearly, there’s still a lot of development work needed to make the scheme fly, but all plaudits to Jeff for giving this some wellie.

Syntagma Media is looking for a new author for our PR5 WordPress blog, Digital Camera Latest. The site already has a good number of posts, reviews, previews etc,. but I want to sharpen up its presentation and posting rate, and make it one of the top digicam information websites.

The blogger should have an excellent knowledge of digital cameras and direct experience of their use. Naturally, an ability to write engagingly about the subject is a must.

Please apply, with sample posts and relevant experience to: John(at)SyntagmaMedia(dot)com.

Update: We have now filled this vacancy. The site will be authored on a shared arrangement from next month.