Each year it is my pleasure to nominate just six short pieces for the Pushcart Prize. Always a tough selection, but here’s my nominations for 2024. Winners would be announced in April 2024 if it comes to that. And the nominees are… Hilton Moore for “The Cell Tower” (North of…
*Time sensitive! Starting soon! Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World an 8-week multi-genre creative writing class with Anya Achtenberg March 24 through May 12 For writers of fiction, memoir/creative nonfiction, poetry, essay, hybrid forms, for an extraordinary expansion of creativity in writing as one writes more…
Reviewed by Chelsy Scherba for Reader Views (02/2021) Carolyn Howard-Johnson helps writers tackle the most challenging step to becoming a published author: the book proposal. “The Great First Impressions Book Proposal: Everything You Need to Know About Selling Your Book to an Agent or Publisher in Thirty Minutes or Less”…
by Carolyn Howard-Johnson We are selling our work when we approach any gatekeeper, an editor, an agent, a contest judge. Here are five little things to avoid so you’ll look like the professional you are. Don’t tell the gatekeeper you always wanted to write. You can think of something more…
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers “Even with a style guide, there are no hard and fast rules in the English language. There are multiple versions of style guides, and the rules for common situations can vary from guide to guide. None…
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson You may know me at “The Frugal Book Promoter”…or novelist. . .or poet. But because it is the New Year maybe you won’t mind if I stray a bit from my usual topics to talk to you about topics that that have been in the news recently—namely…
From the author’s popular “How to Do It Frugally Series,” comes this third edition of The Frugal Book Promoter, a nonfiction guide to getting no-and-low-cost publicity. As the publishing industry has changed over the years—primarily because of the internet—each new edition provides updates accordingly. This latest version of the first…
Holidays in Place and in Placelessness/Multi-visions 2019: a creative writing workshop is for Writers, Artists, and anyone looking forward to, dreading, or thinking on the complex and urgent issues the holidays bring up. I will be doing this two-hour creative writing workshop November 2nd, 3-5pm, at the California Building in…
Synopsis Simply stated, this newly updated third edition of “The Frugal Book Promoter” by Carolyn Howard-Johnson assures even the most novice of authors to get their book gets the best possible start in life, whether their publisher assigns zero dollars or thousands to their book’s marketing campaign. Carolyn is a…
Meet MHP author Carolyn Howard-Johnson on November 2nd 2019 Registration is now open for the 8th Annual 805 Writers Conference moves to the Mandalay Beach Resort in Oxnard Shores, CA for two days of conference sessions and workshops. The 2019 theme is Tools, Skills, Resources —the information writers need to…
The power of dialogue After action, dialogue is the second most powerful tool for bringing fiction to life. It is when characters are quoted while they speak to each other. However, dialogue is not a speech transcript, but a distillation. As an exercise, you might record a conversation between two…
By Sweta Vikram It’s 5 am on Saturday, April 7. My head is ready to explode. I am supposed to speak at a wellness conference in Pennsylvania in a few hours and on Tuesday, April 10, my debut U.S. novel, “Louisiana Catch,” comes out. That very evening, I am doing an intimate wine and reading…
A rhyming title for an essay, you must wonder. Full disclaimer: I am a poet at heart; the crossover to writing and publishing a novel has been transformative, and I wanted to share some things I learned. I won’t lie; it’s been exciting, humbling and exhausting. The release of my…
