Six or seven years ago my advice to aspiring authors of nonfiction books was to build an audience platform by blogging. An example of how critical blogging could be to securing a publishing contract can be found in the case of Ann Marie Ackermann, author of Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee. After an initial assessment of her manuscript, I had recommended she start a historical true-crime blog, and she did. In fact, the editor of the ideal book series at Kent State University Press became a fan of her blog and invited her to submit a book proposal. Her book won a 2018 IPPY in the True Crime category, closed a 180-year-old cold case, and has also been translated into German where it received critical acclaim and was recognized for its scholarly contribution to the history of forensics. Today, blogging may or may not be something an author decides to invest time and energy in. If your authority as an author is based on your subject-area expertise, it remains an important goal to have a visible presence on the internet establishing your credibility. Whether blogging is the best means to achieve that goal depends on you and your project. It may be more important to be listed as an expert source available to journalists and appear as a credible source in news publications covering your subject area. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) may be a better fit to…

Author of Queen of the Mountaineers and American Daredevil, Cathryn J. Prince has signed a publishing contract for her next book, For the Love of Labor: The Pioneering Life of Pauline Newman, with University Press of Kentucky for a 2024 release. Before Greta Thunberg, Emma Gonzalez, or Malala Yousafzai, there was Pauline Newman. She had been union organizing since the age of 16 before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed her comrades. She had arrived in the tenements of the Lower Eastside with her recently widowed mother and younger siblings from Lithuania working in the garment district at the age of 11. The first female organizer of one of America’s most powerful unions, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, she led strikes and carried on the fight to end child labor. She spent eight days in the White House conferring with Francis Perkins, President Roosevelt and others for the New Deal. Part of the Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle of women who spent time at her cottage Val-Kill, Pauline Newman and her partner, Frieda Miller, lived together for more than a half-century, raising a daughter and doting on her two grandsons. For the Labor of Love: The Pioneering Life of Pauline Newman is the first full-scale biography to illustrate how a teen activist spent a lifetime pursuing social justice. Cathryn J. Prince is an author of six previous books, a free-lance journalist, and a journalism educator at Fordham University and SUNY-Purchase. She holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, a B.A. in…

Cathryn Prince is a journalist and award-winning author of historical nonfiction—her most recent work, Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman, will be released on May 7th. This biography explores the life and adventures of the pioneering Fanny Bullock Workman, a woman whose ambition, passion, and determination changed the face of mountain exploration. Stephanie Cheslock has been a beta-reader for Swenson Book Development LLC the past year and this is her first blog post. She interviewed Cathryn Prince after reading an Advance Review Copy of Queen of the Mountaineers. Stephanie Cheslock: Fanny Bullock Workman, the pioneering woman mountain climber, is a fairly obscure topic. How did you discover her and decide to write her biography? Cathryn Prince: I wanted to write about a woman who was a pioneer in her field, who defied social conventions, whose story had been lost to history, and who had a story that would resonate today. So when I stumbled on Workman’s story I was delighted. The more I read, the more intrigued I grew. So many facets of her life resonate today:  her personal ambition, her decision to have children and how that fit into her pursuit of her passion (which she turned into a career), the way her rivalry with another female American mountain climber played out in the media. So many of the issues Workman faced are issues women wrestle with today: including the way strong, ambitious women are judged differently than men. Ultimately Workman wanted to be…