Carly Waters

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680 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Carly Waters’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Shit No One Tells You About Writing · Shooting the Shit About Trends—And Why You Do (And Don't) Need Them—Solo With Carly · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

Welcome to another episode of Shooting the Shit with literary agents Carly Waters and Cece Lira, where we dissect publishing gossip, discuss book industry trends, and the overall state of the book business.

If you've ever wanted to grab a coffee with two literary agents, grab your mug and pull up a chair.

Hi everybody, it is shooting the shit just with Carly today because this is my solo episode.

Cece is in Aspen at her conference and we just couldn't make the timing work with our travel this time so I'm gonna take a solo week and then Cece's gonna take a solo week and hopefully we'll be back in our routine before too long but I was thinking about what to cover.

For my solo episode, I thought I could have a guest on, I could do questions, I could do a panel.

I mean, my mind was spinning about all the things that I could do.

But it is so hard to get so many people in one place these days.

And a lot of you guys haven't experienced my course yet, the Authors Publishing Playbook.

So...

I thought this would be a great opportunity to give you guys a snapshot of what it is like inside my course.

And so I have prepared an excerpt for you guys so you can experience what it is like to be inside my course.

And we're going to talk about trends, why you do and don't need them, go into a bit of a

history of trends, what they mean, why they matter, a bit of the kind of intellectual side and the theory of trends and how they relate to the book business specifically, and layer that over top of something that's happening in the kind of romance and escapism trend space.

So I'm really looking forward to that.

But first, I wanted to cover some questions you guys sent in.

I asked you guys, what should I cover doing a solo episode and you left me some questions.

First question I wanted to tackle was someone asked about the day in the life of a literary agent.

How much time of it is spent on query letters, slush pile, requests, and how do I fit in reading requests versus reading for fun?

So this answer is going to be different depending on different agents.

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