The author biography is an important part of your toolkit as a writer. Primarily it shares your existing professional and publication credits with the person reading it, which means it’s something of an appeal to your authority as a good, experienced writer.
If you’re new to the process, let me give you a couple general rules to follow as you craft your author biography. Then I’ll give you more specific rules to follow when it comes to author bios in query letters, submission letters, and as bylines for published articles.
The First Commandment of Writing an Author Biography: Don’t Be Cutesy.
Avoid mentioning your partner, your pets, or any adorable hobbies in your professional-facing author bio. You may see this happen on jacket flaps, but this is because these are reader-facing author biographies. Their aim is to make the writer of the book feel personable, which might make the reader feel a closer to them (“Hey! I have a sourdough starter too!”) and therefore prompt them to buy the book.
On the other hand, when you’re appealing to an agent, an acquiring editor at a magazine, or writing a byline, I hate to break it to you, but your dog’s full name and the long walks you take with your wife of thirty years don’t matter.
If you’re thinking, “But a byline is reader-facing!” then not so fast. I’ll get to why you shouldn’t be cutesy there in a sec.
The Second Commandment of Writing an Author Biography: Keep It Simple.
Keep your author biography to ideally one to two sentences, topping out at a maximum of three.
The first sentence should mention what sort of writer you are and perhaps where you live. For instance, “Jessica Hatch is a fiction writer and freelance editor based in Florida.”
The second sentence should list no more than the three publication or professional credits (i.e., MFA programs, fellowships, awards) you’re most proud of. If you list too many, you might sound pompous or self-important. If you have no publication credits, I generally recommend omitting this sentence. I’ll provide more specific advice on this matter for three individual scenarios below.
The optional third sentence is for bylines. You can wrap up a byline with a call to action, telling the reader where to find you online. (Ideally you have an author website to point them to, which we’ll cover another day!)
I’ll get into this optional third sentence below, when I talk about how to specifically craft a bio for a byline. In the meantime, let’s talk query and submission letters.
How to Write an Author Bio for a Query Letter.
In a query letter, your author bio is the last full paragraph before you sign off.
Stick to your professional credentials as a writer, to facts about yourself that apply to the book, and to any prepublication acclaim this book has received.
If you have no publication credits to your name, simply state, “This is my first book.”
If you have done something truly impressive that relates to your book, mention it briefly here. For instance, if your novel is about mountain climbers and you personally have climbed the Himalayas with a sherpa, mention it. This is a marketable fact the agent can use when speaking to prospective editors, and it’s certainly going on the editor’s “tip sheet,” which will inform the book’s eventual sales and marketing campaigns.
Prepublication acclaim means that you’ve workshopped this novel with a well-known novelist or at a well-known conference, not that your great-aunt Tilly thinks it’s sublime.
There is no need to mention where the agent can find you online. You’ve reached out to them via email and provided your contact information in the query letter, so they know how to contact you.
How to Write an Author Bio for a Submission Letter to a Literary Magazine.
The name of the game with a submission letter is to “keep it simple, sweetheart.” Magazine submissions editors read through hundreds if not thousands of pieces during a submission period. An overblown submission letter is more likely to be a hindrance than a help in getting your piece read, much less published.
As in a query letter, your author bio may need to be the last full paragraph before you sign off. I say “may need to be” because if you don’t have any publication or professional credits to your name, then you don’t really need to include an author bio.
Again, there is no need to tell an acquiring editor how to find you. You knocked on their door.
You can learn more about the author bio section of a submission letter and get the answers to other submission letter questions here on the Gotham Writers website.
How to Write an Author Bio for the Byline to a Published Article or Story.
Hey, congrats! You have a published story coming out. That’s certainly a feather in your cap, something you can include in your professional credentials section from now on.
For those who are new to the term, a byline is an author credit that can be as short as the writer’s name, but is sometimes used to refer to the biography you see either at the end of an article (both online and in print) or in a contributors’ section at the back of a magazine.
Byline bios are a bit different than the bios we use in covering letters for queries and submissions. The biggest difference is that sometimes writers can skip the querying process altogether if they have written a truly compelling story, essay, or article.
This is because agents read broadly and widely. They don’t just read their slush and solicited manuscripts or books that are about to or have just come out. They also read newspapers, magazines, and blogs, searching hungrily for their next big client.
With this in mind, it’s a good idea to hint at your long-form project in a byline. If a writer gets an agent because of a story they’ve published, it’s because the piece attracted the attention of such an agent. Then, likely, their byline mentioned a related long-form project they’re working on. As in, “John Doe is currently working on a book about the history of the sofa.” If an agent representing quirky nonfiction books reads John’s article on the etymology of the word chair, then sees this in the byline, boo howdy are they going to want to talk to John!
And this is why it’s helpful to add that third sentence about where you can be found online, to make it easy for an agent who is doing the unthinkable and reaching out to you first to find you.