✨Meet Your Dream Agent. Plus, Query Critiques Inside; No Outline? No Problem!; & What to Do With Editorial Feedback✨
Also, don't miss yesterday's Shooting the Shit!
Happy Tuesday, writing friends!
Yesterday was Shooting the Shit day on the podcast. By now you know that 🔫+💩= a damn good time! You don’t want to miss their fascinating discussion of a breakdown of debut author advances and what writers are really getting paid today.
Last week was 📕Books with Hooks 🪝week on the podcast, so you can find Carly and CeCe’s written query critiques below.
We have a brilliant essay by Amy Coombe, author of Stay for a Spell, titled The Pants Process in which she discusses her complicated relationship with pantsing:
“Before I started writing fiction, I admit that I side-eyed the sort of pantsing sentiments I’d hear authors express, like “the book just wrote itself” or “I let my characters develop on the page”. As my personal experience writing was in essays and criticism, where the most effective work requires rather a rigid process, I simply didn’t believe these sorts of statements. Surely, I thought to myself, such sentiments bespeak a lack of intellectual and methodological rigour? Surely, I thought, that was just (I’m really sorry about this) lazy writing?
Look, no writing is lazy. No writing is lacking in rigour. To put thoughts on paper is work, and to have them make sense is rigorous. The process doesn’t matter. What’s important is the whole.”
Then, in today’s video which is titled Mastering the Art of Giving and Receiving Writing Feedback, Kelly Yang, author of The Take, shares her extensive experience with editorial feedback.
Finally, in our popular new Meet Your Dream Agent segment, we profile Jessica Felleman of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. We know how much you all hate waiting so long to hear back from agents, but sometimes the wait is a good thing:
“It’s taken me 6 months or longer before [replying], but I really try to do it in 3. It’s never taking me that long to read (if it was, it would be a pass), but it can take me that long to find a calm break where I’m mentally ready to have my socks blown off.”
Keep reading to see if you’re likely to be one of the authors who’ll blow Jessica’s 🧦 off!
That’s all for now. Thanks for being here! ❤️
❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
This Week on ‘Shooting the Shit’
This week, Carly and CeCe dive into major shifts in publishing—from quiet updates to the ‘New York Times’ bestseller list to growing concerns about editors using AI behind the scenes. Carly and CeCe unpack what these changes signal about industry trends, including the rise of audiobooks and the decline of mass market paperbacks. They also tackle the controversy around manuscripts being fed into AI tools—and what that means for author trust and confidentiality. Plus, a fascinating breakdown of debut author advances reveals what writers are really getting paid today.
Listen to it here or watch it on YouTube!
