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…

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…

Does an author really need to blog? Not necessarily. If you are writing fiction or a children’s storybook, probably not. If you’re writing nonfiction or memoir, probably so. To answer the question, you must ask yourself whether you can reach the audience who will buy your book with a blog. Children rarely make consumer choices about books, but their parents do. Tina L. Peterson wrote a middle-grade novel, Oscar and the Amazing Gravity Repellent. She has a Ph.D. in mass media and communications and is an activist for media literacy. In Media Parentis is where she blogs about smartphones and sleep deprivation, Superbowl Advertising Bingo, and why we need diverse children’s literature. If you have a way to speak to those who buy books like yours, then a blog may be a tool to pull customers to your writing. If you are writing for wildlife naturalists who spend the majority of their time in the field in remote locations like Linda J. Spielman, then you likely don’t need to blog because your customers aren’t likely to be searching online for A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals in the Northeast. But if your book is about a nonfiction subject on which people use search engines to seek out new information, then blogging can be an important instrument in your author’s bag toolkit. Blogging serves two purposes. One, it helps search engines keep your site at the top of the list of hits when someone types in your keywords. Every time you post…