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…

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…

Summer is for reading. And this summer World War II has never seemed more relevant. To reward reading and reflection on this history, Swenson Book Development LLC is offering a three book giveaway. Marcel’s Letters, Chasing Portraits, and Shot from the Sky are the three titles by author clients who have agreed to reward one lucky winner with all three books. To register to win, leave a comment below. The random drawing will be held August 11. The winner will receive in the mail these three titles which all make history fresh and reveal an unknown aspect of World War II history. Marcel’s Letters brings to the light the little known STO—Service du travail obligatoire—forced labor of French men under the Vichy regime to work for Hitler’s Nazi regime. Chasing Portraits is a quest to discover the lost art legacy of a great-granddaughter of Moshe Rynecki, a Warsaw artist who painted a visual ethnography of Jewish culture exterminated in the Holocaust. And Shot from the Sky is the unknown history of American POWs in Switzerland. Carolyn Porter is the author of Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate (Skyhorse Publishing, June 6, 2017). Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters–they were in French–but she noticed all of them had been signed by…