Ruth Newton

speaker

128 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Ruth Newton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing · The First Guest on Books With Hooks is Publishing! & The Protagonist as an Outsider · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

Hi Bianca, nice to see you again.

So way back when, I'm actually not quite clear on the year, but I know it was before COVID because that's when I started The Carrier.

I applied to be on the shit that no one tells you about writing with a different book that I was writing to have my first pages critiqued.

I believe I was your first guest.

I don't think you'd had an author come in before to have that live critique experience.

And it was so brilliant.

Even though I didn't finish that book, it was a real milestone for me to share my work publicly, speak to people about my work and feel like it was something I could do.

And also the criticism of it was useful because it made me really interrogate, like, is this the one?

And it turns out halfway through, it wasn't the book I wanted to write.

But some of the themes and the thinking behind it very much shows up in the carrier as well.

so in terms of your journey to publication i mean you've already won all these awards the book is not out yet can you take us through how this works yes i think it says probably quite a lot about me that i need like deadlines and and things to help me work and so there's lots of competitions out there for unpublished writers and where you can submit

partial parts of your manuscripts pre-publication and have those reviewed by judges who will then maybe offer a manuscript assessment in return, or just, you know, a celebration of your work so far.

So I think I just needed some sort of milestones and validation along the way to feel like I should pursue this.

So I basically just sought out any, any

opportunities there were and and submitted my manuscript as I went along and used as much feedback as I could get from winning those competitions and also confidence boost if I'm honest to keep going that's a really great way of doing it because the thing is is that you know we write this book for a year or two we do it in the void maybe we send it to some beta readers and

No, so my agent, I landed through just going out like the slush pile query letters.

But I do think having those wins on my query letter and following your advice of how to write a good query letter really helped it stand out.

And a couple of people got back to me quite quickly and they were like, oh, I saw the Friday Night Live and it was just a marker of something different.

So yes, I did this sort of cold outreach, but I had those things on my letter, which helped.

And I also would like to say that even if I hadn't won the things or been shortlisted, it still would have been useful because it was a deadline.

Showing 1–20 of 128 · page 1 of 7