From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. In For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman, Cathryn J. Prince tells the story of a self-educated Jewish immigrant who dedicated herself to a legion of causes and lifelong battles against sexism and classism. Prince follows Newman’s life from a youth split between Lithuania and New York City sweatshops to her work as an advisor to New Deal–era labor secretary Frances Perkins. Newman’s long hours at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory informed her entrée into labor activism. In the following years, she tirelessly advocated for workers, ran for New York Secretary of State as a socialist, and became the first woman to serve as the ILGWU general organizer. Her interest in the health of workers led to service on the Joint Board of Sanitary Control and a decades-long term as education director of the ILGWU health center. Membership in Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle opened doors to government positions and advisory roles that continued into the postwar era. Prince also weaves in the details of Newman’s fifty-year relationship with a woman, her struggles with her sexual identity, and her final years. Engaging and panoramic, For the Love of Labor is the first major biography of an important figure in labor and women’s history Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor of journalism at Fordham University. Her books include Queen of…

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…

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…