Reshared post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

The biggest news in publishing of the summer is the merger of Random House and Penguin-says the writer KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH.I agree and have been saying it since the merger happened. She explains why this merger is such a big deal and what it means if you want to get published now that the merger is done.She writes, "Look real hard at the movie industry, because its focus on weekend box office should look familiar. To see the impact this kind of thinking—the short-term thinking—has on creative endeavors...""Of the 15,000 titles that Random Penguin will publish in 2014, most of them will have “blockbuster” potential, and will be similar to what has been done before. They’ll also be tweaked and prodded and forced into molds that the books might not have been involved in."The conclusion is that the Big Five publishers will use Amazon and the rest of the Indie author platforms to cherry pick, but she has a warning, this not the publishing business you grew up with.

Original Post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Today's Business Blog focuses on the biggest publishing news of the summer--in my opinion, anyway:

The marvelous Tom Dupree, one of the best people I've ever worked with in traditional publishing, wrote a great blog last month. In it, he claims that the biggest news of the summer so far, maybe even the biggest news of the year, isn't the fact that Apple lost the anti-trust lawsuit the Justice ...