My print publishing business, Dial Publishing, is currently in exploratory talks to buy a small, but established print publisher of nonfiction books. This is still at the confidential, due diligence stage, so no names or pack drill.

If the buy comes off it will bring a solid backlist of steady sellers to Dial’s inventory, plus a fund of experience and connections impossible to create overnight. Dial Publishing is a totally separate business from Syntagma Digital Limited, which is our digital publishing company.

These events have ballooned out over the Easter period and have led me to reflect on the essential differences between print and digital publishing. With 20 years of print experience and two years of digital publishing behind me, I’m only now beginning to see the wood from the trees.

Let’s state from the outset that we’re talking profitable projects here, not worthwhile artistic efforts which gain critical acclaim but lose money — they are more in the province of personal blogs. In the commercial sphere, it’s the money that determines the outcome in both cases, as always.

Digital and print publishing are surprisingly complementary over a range of possible output. Speaking very generally, the money in digital publishing is in :

Bite-sized reports on events and products that command large-scale interest.

Most essay-type sites don’t make any money at all. The way still to earn income publishing online (not social networking) remains in a few mega-niches : finance, automotive, gadgets, gossip and miscellaneous products and services. Looking across Syntagma’s 50-60 sites the ones with large numbers of text link ads stand out a mile. That’s a very good test of financial viability. All our projects going forward focus on these areas.

The gold in nonfiction print publishing comes from :

Lengthy exposition and detailed information on essential topics and useful techniques.

Most writers find one of these branches easier to accomplish than the other. Just a few may be good at both.

So, in terms of cash and results, there are two discrete environments — print and digital publishing — to work with. Both are capable of bringing results, but the need to consolidate and move on is ever present, especially online.

Other Considerations
To succeed in digital publishing you need to play the market and its highly volatile readership with a certain degree of cunning. Traffic is driven by keywords and buzz — what we used to call “word of mouth”, but now in a different context. To win online you have to get down and dirty with search engine optimization and a measure of gaming of the system. Google benefits too, so there’s real scope for the dark arts here.

Some people don’t really like that aspect of digital publishing — I confess to being a bit chary of it myself. However, to win a war you have to kill people. There’s no other way.

Print publishing is much more congenial to anyone with scruples, although the scope for shenanigans is increasing by the day, especially as the number of titles being published grows beyond the public’s capacity — and wish — to purchase. Content and reputation count above all in today’s busy marketplace.

Complementarity
If you indulge in both arms of publishing, what are the cross-fertilizations you can call up to improve both businesses?

There are many, but in brief :

* You can sell books online and use websites for publicity.
* Books can contain a list of web addresses to get a new audience logging on.
* Multiple cross-references can drive traffic both ways.
* Websites can provide an introduction, while a book develops the whole picture.
* Books can refer readers to websites for more up-to-date information.

These are real benefits and, used smartly, can make a great deal of difference to success on- and offline.

The convergence of digital and print publishing is therefore more of a complementarity than a merging. That the same people are now often doing both is a sign that a mature marketplace is developing which successfully crosses the seemingly large ravine between the two outlets for publishing.

Which, though, potentially yields the bigger return on investment?

That will have to be left to another post, so stay close.

To all of you who have emailed inquiring about my absence from the Syntagma battlements in recent weeks, thank you.

I’ve been completing the last of my contract obligations for a media company with strong ties to the retail sector. Now that it’s complete, I can concentrate totally on Syntagma’s weighty world affairs. Exhaustion, however, may slow me down in the first few days. Bear with me if I don’t get round to you immediately.

We do, though, have a fast-track channel for anyone wishing to pay us.

Apart from the routine operations always present in a large network, we have a huge slew of new projects and maturing older ones to tackle after Easter. Here’s a taster :

* Moneyizor network magazine to be designed and launched, including three new webtitles to be set up.

* Final proofread of Syntagma Media’s first print book of the new season : Naked Tales — Stories By Writers Who Blog, which is being published by Humdrumming in May.

* Complete switch over to new Windows Vista systems for all activities. We’re also making the move to Microsoft Office 2007 in one fell swoop. I’m really looking forward to all the glitches.

* Work on Dial Publishing’s new edgewise general trade imprint. The first print title will be Steve Newman’s brilliant fictionalized biography of Ernest Hemingway, currently being serialized here by Syntagma Digital.

* Initial work on our Retailz USA retail portal, due in May/June.

* Something called “real life”. What can that be?

One morning I’ll wake up with absolutely nothing to do all day. Then I’ll know I’m dead.

In the meantime, raise the bugle and signal the advance.

This is to announce our new consultancy business, Dial Consultants, which covers digital publishing, online content creation and management.

The business is separate from Syntagma Digital and is part of Dial Publishing, our print publishing house.

On offer : 20 years experience in magazine, general, and educational publishing — see here, here and here – and, in particular, one and a half years building Syntagma Digital from scratch into a 50 website content creator, divided into four network magazines. Add on a career as a full-time author and journalist and that’s the swagbag now dangling at the door of Syntagma Towers.

To contact Dial Consultants, email : John(at)dialpublishing(dot)com. It’s as simple as that.

The final step in our reorganization has been taken. Syntagma Media is now a redundant name, except in the URL of this webtitle, where it will remain. It may, though, be resurrected as a holding company when Syntagma Television appears on your screens in 2008.

Dial Publishing — the print arm — has been completely separated off from the online business, which will now be incorporated in the UK as Syntagma Digital.

We’ve introduced these changes gradually to see how they feel in practice and whether we can live with them. The answer is, yes. Apart from the internet address of this site, all references to Syntagma Media will be eventually removed from the inventory.

The reason is not that we cease to be a media business, just that there are a lot of them out there. Anyone blogging about blogging these days refers to themselves as a media business. We are following our own path and the new titles reflect that.

Okay, it’s not such a big deal, but names are important as they become brands over time. Syntagma is the brand, digital is what we do, “media” is a given and doesn’t need stressing in the company name.

As for Dial Publishing, it will take on a life of its own as a print publisher of business and digital-publishing books. It will also cover our consultancy business and all other offline activities. Dial will no longer be referred to as the print arm of Syntagma Media.

So the process of reconstructing the business that began three months ago is almost complete. In a week or two we can get down to some real work at last — producing large amounts of quality digital content.

Note : Some domain names are currently pointing to this site. They include : SyntagmaDigital.com, SyntagmaTelevision.com and SyntagmaTV.com. These properties will be built in due course.

In previous posts I’ve looked at creating a digital network out of own-resources – bootstrapping — as a way of avoiding the venture capital squeeze — bear-hugging. Now it’s time for some specifics.

Lately, we’ve been looking back over the past 16 months of Syntagma Media’s existence and attempting to work out the full cost of the operation in monetary terms. Remember, it’s been done without VC finance, bank or Angel loans or equity sales of any kind. The only aid has been a credit card, which is cleared at the end of every month. Clearly someone must have borne the full cost.

We calculated all the costs of setup, fees for advice, authoring, design, general tech, plus all the usual business stuff. I also added in my own cost and resources at my standard consultancy rate. The sweep mainly included Syntagma Digital, but also the much smaller liabilities of Dial Publishing — our incubating print arm.

The total cost to my personal exchequer came to $250,000.

I must confess I was a little taken aback by that number. I hadn’t realized I had that amount of loose change floating about. But accountancy doesn’t lie.

Of course, there has been a good deal of income, especially in the past 6 — 9 months. All of that has also gone back into the business. So the bottom line sits on the question : is Syntagma Digital worth more than a quarter of a million bucks?

I’ll let you into a secret, I was offered more than that around four months ago, but the deal involved running someone else’s British business.

Setting up a digital content business then doesn’t come cheap. The fact is, we could have spent considerably more as, for example, our near contemporary b5media has. It’s very much a matter of priorities and some fine calculation of whether a particular expenditure will be cost-effective or not. In my experience (16 months worth) most expenditures are not.

Refining the art of spending is therefore top of the agenda when it comes to bloodsucking your business — I use that term instead of bootstrapping here because it helps to know that it’s your blood the business is sucking. That knowledge alone concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Finale : Sixteen months in, $250,000 down, working like a sugar-cane cutter, no end in sight. Is it all worth it? Wait for the book*. All the killer facts are there.

* The Syntagma Story by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing later this year.

Strange thing, human nature. Ever since I announced I was writing a book called The Syntagma Story people are being very nice to me. I wonder why?

Maybe they think I’m going to write nasty things about them.

Well, it’s one way of getting people to buy a book. Needless to say, the first edition of this one will not have an index, so you won’t be able to look yourself up at the pre-checkout side of the bookshop. You’ll just have to buy it and read it from cover to cover.

As Syntagma is both Syntagma Media’s business website, as well as my personal jabberboard, I’m permitted to jab at whomever I like, so long as it shows a profit. Selling our own books counts twice.

Jo Vitale is said to be the master at moving business books off the shelf. But his method is all about skyscraper ads full of pratful patter and positive thinking. As far I as know he never used raw fear as a sales aid.

Ach! I knew it was a mistake to read our newest webtitle this morning : Guy Adams’s The Dark Room, devoted to the bloodcurdling arts of horror. If I go on reading this stuff, I may have to write a sequel to The Syntagma Story. Maybe I’ll call it, Marketing Books the Vampire Way.

Hang on to your clotting factor, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

When I started writing about our network magazine project, it was greeted with some disbelief in the publishing netosphere. Now that the roll-out is nearly complete, folk are realizing that we really do mean business here at Syntagma.

So, being mildly provocative again — and as it’s Sunday — here’s a list of our projects going forward as far as 2009, including the till-now ultra-secret iSyntagma.

Network Magazines
We have created the portals for our three initial network magazines, Allusionz, LifeTimes and 21st-century Phi, and are now adding four new Thord Hedengren designs to all of our 50 sites. We’ve completed a quarter of them, the rest will follow over the next two weeks.

We’ve also embarked on the final step in the process, which is to aggregate our stats-capture by magazine, in addition to by individual site. The reason is that from now our advertising will be sold per network mag rather than by webtitle.

In other words, we’re moving away from 10,000 page-view pitches to a composite pitch for 20 or so similar and related webtitles. This bridges the gap between offering single sites to advertisers, or the whole inventory, which is so diverse only the most general buyers would be interested.

We’ll still carry our classified ads at the top of the posts (see here), and on a per site basis, since we’re looking for $200-$500 a month per webtitle for this space and the classifieds are running ahead of any alternatives at the present time.

Our business plan specified six network magazines by October 2007 — our second anniversary. Since our two shopping portals have been put on hold (see below), I expect we’ll now have four working network magazine titles by October.

Shopping Portals
I wrote a bit about this here a day or two ago, specifically the glass ceiling we encounted when trying to break into the big-ad retail markets in North America and the UK.

Our two shopping portals : Retailz USA and ShopShape UK required much more input than our current strength allowed when relying on own-resources. Talks with possible partners fell down because they were all stronger than we were, and inevitably had their own ideas on how it should be done.

I’m not temperamentally suited to being a junior partner in anything, so we’ve put these projects back until we have sufficient internal strength to be at least the major determiner in the project. The portals are now scheduled for late 2008 or spring 2009.

Dial Publishing
Dial Publishing was my first attempt at being an independent print publisher. It concentrated on educational books and courses, and was successful until the market went pear-shaped (see here for more details).

Now it’s being refurbished as the print arm of Syntagma Media, and will publish its first titles in the second half of this year. Two to watch are, The Syntagma Story, and Superdemocracy – The Art of Corporate Governance, both by yours truly. They will be followed by other titles by other authors.

iSyntagma
Now we come to our biggest project of all, the top secret iSyntagma, which we’ve been researching and working on for a while under a cloak of invisibility. If you go to isyntagma.com you’ll just see an untouched Wordpress Kubrick shell. Amazingly it has a PR of 4.

To prove that my forthcoming book, The Syntagma Story is really going to be worth reading, I’ve decided to spill the beans on this rocking more-than-an-aspiration-more-an-inspiration projectile.

We’ve decided to vault over the podcasting scene completely — too much like blogging, too many amateurs, and too primitive compared with what’s on offer by the broadcasters. And it will never show a profit.

Instead, iSyntagma will launch … trumpets and drum roll … Thank you, orchestra, a bit louder next time. Will launch :

Syntagma Television will be an internet TV channel, broadcasting live TV and video from the West Country of England to a select few, niche audiences, among which will be the tech crowd. It’s a serious project and is well underway.

Just log on to SyntagmaTV.com or SyntagmaTelevision.com sometime in 2008 and we’ll be beaming at you wherever you are.

As a Bob Cringely reader I know of the current bandwidth problems, but also how Google among others are working on the solutions. If 2007 is the year the net collapses under the weight of video downloads (Bit Torrent currently takes more than 50pc of bandwidth resources), 2008 will see new opportunities emerge, and Syntagma Television will be unveiled in that more temperate climate.

Again, we’re going to try to do this within own-resources. If you’ve got a million bucks to invest, do not offer it to us — I might be tempted.

So there you have it. Our future starkly portrayed in all its impossible glory. One thing you should know : we revel in the impossible.

We have been preparing for our ultimate incorporation for some months, pausing only to ensure we have the right balance of elements and sufficient profitability to sustain a much larger operation. However, with our new design currently in hand by Thord Hedengen, it seemed the right moment to declare our new structure, which will be progressively implemented in the second quarter of the year.

Syntagma Media will split into two operating divisions. The first, Syntagma Digital, will contain all our online properties — some 53 websites — including, three network magazines and the (currently) top secret plans codenamed, iSyntagma.

The second new division of Syntagma Media is named Dial Publishing and will handle all print and other offline publishing and consulting work. This side of the business is set to swing into action in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

It always amazes me the amount of work involved in changing even the smallest sliver of a fully-functioning business, so we do this sparingly at all times.

But the time has come to launch : Syntagma Digital.