Most magazines, print and digital, are little more than advertising platforms whose readers are defined as “targets”, valued in quantity over quality, and when the advertising revenue stream dries up, the magazines usually fold, readers be damned.
What I most like about Wendig is not that he has one foot firmly planted on both sides of the fence, strategically taking advantage of self-publishing opportunities, while also working the traditional channels. It's that he's a good writer and gives good story. When that's your starting point, business models are simply tools, not useless badges to prop up your sad little ego.
In the pre-digital days, influential media brands like Cosmopolitan and Vogue were one of the primary gateways for marketers to connect with consumers. They offered an attentive audience that would have been difficult for most marketers to gather without investing heavily in staff and infrastructure. Today, those media brands are no longer primary gateways, and marketers aren't nearly as reliant on them to reach their desired audience as they used to be as they now have cost-effective tools at their disposal to engage directly with consumers.
Book publishers, on the other hand, have traditionally either focused on "digital" as a secondary medium, or worse, not even as a distinct medium at all, simply a fascimile or marketing channel for their print products. In doing so, they've effectively positioned themselves for easier disintermediation, being seen as container manufacturers instead of content curators and community organizers.
On the publishing side, the devaluation of content isn't anything new, with publishers themselves as guilty of it as the technology vendors they often rush into bed with without thinking through the ramifications.
Of course, last week’s much hyped and completely vague announcement of Bookish, a new joint venture between three of the “Big 6? – Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Group — caught my attention, not for its unusual (but not unprecedented) collaborative angle, but for its disappointingly unimaginative and shortsighted value proposition.
Right now, the relative ease of digital publishing -- not yet the equivalent of blogging, but getting closer every week -- and the exceptional successes of a relative handful of authors masks the larger challenges ahead for authors and publishers alike, regardless of their business model: discoverability.