![]() This includes Workshops or Writers Conferences as well as formal education-especially if you worked with a high-profile teacher. Plus people like to be able to picture you in your native habitat. Your hometown might make a good focus for marketing. If he’d called himself a “writer” there would have been no story. I remember when Christopher Moore’s first book, Practical Demonkeeping, came out and all the Central Coast papers ran stories about how a “local waiter” had just sold a book to Disney. If you’re seriously underemployed and want to keep it to yourself, you can call yourself a “freelance writer,” but consider saying what else you do, even if it’s less than impressive. NB: Don’t call yourself a “novelist” if you haven’t published one. Here’s where you say you’re a welder or a fourth grade teacher or whatever, even if it isn’t related to the subject matter of your book. Keep homing pigeons? Run marathons? Cook prize-winning chili? Put it in. OK, so you aren’t the baby who got rescued from that well forty years ago, and you never cheated on Robert Pattinson, but whatever is quirky or unusual about you, trot it out. Things to consider including: 1) Whatever might make you newsworthy ![]() “Hermione Oz Humm was born in the Emerald City and is an expert balloonist, ventriloquist and voice-over performer.” ![]() Humm is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Middle America with her dentist husband, 2.4 children and a dog named Rex.”īut a bio is all about making yourself stand out. The purpose is to make yourself sound professional and INTERESTING. (I advise against this unless it’s specifically requested or you have a great, up-to-date, professional photo that makes you look like a contestant on one of those Top Model shows.)You’re aiming for a style similar to book jacket copy. Keep to about 250 words: one page, double-spaced–or 1/2 page single-spaced, if you include a photo above it. Even though you’ve never published anything but the Halloween haiku that won second prize in your high school newspaper.Īctually, you want to write two bios: A paragraph suitable for a magazine byline, and a longer one-page version for sending to agents and later posting on your website, blog, etc. Before you send off another query or enter another contest. Every word you send out there is a writing sample, not just those well-honed pages or stories. You do NOT want to dash off an author bio in five minutes. You’re going to be in print! Or maybe get an agent. You’re so excited you’re jumping out of your skin, so you dash something off in five minutes and hit “send.” Wow. Or just when you were giving up hope, you get that reply from your dream agent: “I’m intrigued by your nove l Down and Out on the Yellow Brick Road. Please send the first fifty pages, and an Author Bio.” We’d like to publish your story, Glinda: Heartbreaker of Oz in our next issue. The response from an editor: “You’re the winner of our October ‘Bad Witch’ short story contest. You’d feel pretentious calling yourself an “author.”īut it might be time to start-at least privately.īecause one day, in the not too distant future, you’ll open your email and there it will be: You may still be afraid to tell more than a handful of people you’re a writer. You’ve won a few local contests, but so far you haven’t had much luck getting into print. Or maybe you write short fiction and poetry and you’ve got a bunch of pieces you’ve been sending out to contests and literary journals. Or worse, that slow disappointment of no response at all. Maybe you’ve got a novel finished and you’ve been sending out queries.
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