Shooting The Shit About Changes to the NYT Bestseller List and Editors Allegedly Using AI
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
Bianca Marais, Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra
4.8 • 842 Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Note: CeCe Lyra is a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates. If you’d like to query CeCe, please refer to the submission guidelines at www.wsherman.com. Carly Watters is a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency, but her work on this podcast is not affiliated with the agency, and the views expressed by Carly on this podcast are solely that of her as a podcast co-host and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of P.S. Literary Agency.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of Shooting the Shit with literary agents Carly Waters and Cece Learro, |
| 0:08.2 | where we dissect publishing gossip, discuss book industry trends, and the overall state of the book business. |
| 0:14.1 | If you've ever wanted to grab a coffee with two literary agents, grab your mug and pull up a chair. |
| 0:26.2 | Thank you. agents, grab your mug and pull up a chair. Hello, everybody. |
| 0:27.7 | You got Carly and Cece here today with lots of juicy stuff to talk about. |
| 0:31.7 | You know, we should have placed a wager on if we could ever go a week without talking about |
| 0:36.6 | AI. |
| 0:37.0 | It was kind of a running joke for a while there. |
| 0:39.1 | Now it is very clear, very clear that we will not ever be going a week without talking about it |
| 0:44.3 | unless we are not recording. |
| 0:45.5 | And it is that simple. |
| 0:46.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:47.2 | I don't think anyone would have taken that bet, though. |
| 0:51.8 | Or they would have been like, what are these agents even talking about in terms of the modern publishing landscape? But we've got some fun things to talk about today. I'm not sure if this slipped under people's radar or not, but the New York Times has made some changes to their bestseller list, which I think we have to alert everybody to. It kind of went, as I said, I'm not sure if it went a little bit unnoticed. I think the news went live the week before Easter. So I think it slipped under the radar a little bit. And then we got, I know I got a lot of DMs about this. I'm sure you got a lot of DMs about this, which is the, our editors using AI internally to assess manuscripts, bookseller article. And we're going to talk about that. So we've got lots of, lots of things going on. |
| 1:28.1 | And then we have a really interesting breakdown on Substack. 60 debut authors were involved in a |
| 1:35.4 | survey about the breakdown of their advances and things like that, which is really juicy |
| 1:39.1 | and interesting. So you want to pay attention through the whole episode. We got lots of good |
| 1:44.0 | stuff going on. |
| 1:45.3 | But, Cece, I know you are making your monthly pilgrimage to New York next week. |
| 1:49.8 | What do you have on top for that? |
| 1:52.3 | Oh, gosh. |
| 1:53.0 | I have a really fun book launch on Tuesday. |
... |
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