When I finally returned from Spain to England, my first thoughts were to publish all the philosophical writing I’d done there. However, a catastrophic fall in the Iberian housing market meant that I needed to make money, not lose it — which is what philosophy famously does.

I decided to utilize my former science background by setting up an educational publishing company — Dial Publishing, specializing in courses on technical writing, editing and publishing. Here’s the cover of our first course :

I also had a book on Technical Writing published by trade publisher, Newnes, now part of William Heinemann. Here it is :

The splendid news for us (me and my business partner) was that the British Government was at the time paying 80pc of students’ fees for accredited courses. After a lot of unnecessary compliance work, ours were accredited. We had six courses in total under the series title of Writing for Business and Technology, all written by yours truly.

However, to justify the name Dial Publishing, I also edited and published a literary quarterly : The Dial. Here’s the cover of the first issue :

This phase rapidly came to a close when HM Gov — in its wisdom — suddenly scrapped the £2 billion ($3.8bn) scheme because, it said, it was being abused by Animal Rights activists. Well, Pooter lives.

After that bombshell it seemed simpler to take to the net where you sank or swam by your own efforts, not at the behest of hopeless ministers and civil servants. And that, folks, was when Syntagma Media came kicking and squealing into the world.

I haven’t mentioned my philosophical books because they’re not quite relevant here. But one is to be published next June by Humdrumming. It’s called : The Nirvaneans — The Natural History of Nirvana.

And that’s not the pop band — although I suppose pop bands could have a natural history since they smoke so much grass.

I’ve also got three short stories coming out in May (again under the Humdrumming imprint) in the form of Naked Tales, another in the series of books produced by our writers’ cabal, Writers Blog Alliance.

But I’m name-dropping too much here. Ah, one name I’ve forgotten, though : Dial Publishing, now the print publishing arm of Syntagma Media, is set to rise again phoenix-fashion from the Ashes urn, with The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Publisher of Network Magazines.

Not to be missed.

And that ends my short series on one strand in my publishing career to date. Anyone still out there ….?

When you reach a certain age — 19 nowadays — you’re allowed to reminisce a little about your past. Not that I’m anything like 19, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Here’s a picture of the first national (UK) magazine I edited : Network User, all about telecoms and aimed at IT managers of major players like the banks, the London Stock Exchange and others of similar corporate weight.

I developed Network User from a small newsletter called simply, Network. The ugly brute of a burglar on the cover was actually our esteemed designer, Richard Downer, whose previous work included the famous illustrations on the front of Post Office telephone directories.

While we were shooting that pic, he was terrified the police would arrest him for attempted robbery. We had our replies ready : “No officer, I’ve never seen that man in my life.” — at least, that’s what we told him afterwards.

Looking through the magazine now, I still feel almost the same rush of heady excitement as seeing it for the first time, hot off the presses. Maybe because I’m a bit older, but I don’t quite get that same thrill when I look at anything I’ve done online.

Why? It’s too easy.

We sweated blood over that first issue of Network User in a way internet folk can’t imagine unless they’ve done it themselves.

We had a huge budget, employed the best people in their fields, were paid large salaries and had the run of late 1980s London, a place literally sizzling with excitement — probably something like Silicon Valley in its heyday.

Those were the days. We were Monarchs of all we surveyed and drove all before us. Champions, indeed.

But even great decades run their course. The flashy 80s were replaced by the boring 90s, and I headed to an isolated farmhouse in southern Spain with a nice view of Gibraltar and the Med. There I spent my time writing philosophy and growing avocados, apricots and figs.

Returning to England seven years later and wondering what to do with myself, I fell into the Web and blogging and started doing much the same as I’d done before. That is, producing network magazines.

So events turn full circle in the end. What creatures of habit we are.

Nicholas Carr does a neat summary of the Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang’s presentation : “The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content Are King in Entertainment.”

I’ve not had a chance to read the pdf yet, but if Carr’s precis is spot on, it reinforces much of what we’ve been saying here for quite a while :

Wang argues that both ends of the value chain — content creation and content distribution — are increasingly characterized by oversupply and hence weak profitability. Value, as a result, is migrating to the center of the value chain, where content aggregation and branding take place. The profit, in other words, is in packaging. Which means that, economically anyway, the middleman is still sitting pretty.

Consider the middleman as publisher and you have : content selection and branding are God.

A reminder that our 2006 Writer’s Blog Anthology in book form is now available from Amazon, thanks to the hard work of Deborah Woehr, who edited and designed it, as well as pushing it through the publishing process.

Having just received my copy, which was printed by Lightning Source, I must report that the quality of printing and production is amazing for an on-demand book. Too often POD (print on demand) books look and feel trashy and badly produced. The Anthology is indistinguishable from a good trade paperback.

It also contains some fine writing from a wide range of authors. The work was submitted from blog posts written by members of Writers’ Blog Alliance, all of whom are writers in one form or another.

This would make a great gift for anyone who likes a good read, or who is caught up in blogging.

Buy it here from Amazon.