Writing an author bio
Almost every author writes the same hundred words about themselves, and almost every author writes them badly. Not because the writing is poor — these are people who can write — but because the bio gets done last, at eleven at night, in a field on an upload form that will not let you save the page without it.
So out come the coy jokes, the full employment history, the degree that has nothing to do with the book, and the sentence about the cat.
A bio is not a biography
That is the whole problem in one line. A biography tells the story of a life. A bio has one job: to make a stranger, holding this book for eight seconds, believe it is worth their time and their money.
Everything in those hundred words should be earning that. If a fact does not make this particular book more trustworthy or more interesting, it is taking up space that something else could use. That test — does this earn its place against this book — settles nearly every question people agonize over.
What belongs, for nonfiction
For nonfiction, the bio is doing heavy work. The reader is deciding whether you are the right person to have written this, and the bio is where they look.
The credential that bears directly on the subject. Twenty-two years as a midwife. A decade running a bakery. The degree, if it is the subject's degree. Name it plainly and put it first.
Relevant work in the same territory. Previous books, a column, a practice, a job the reader can picture.
Something that shows scale or proof. Patients seen, years spent, places worked. One number beats three adjectives.
Nothing else is compulsory. A nonfiction bio that establishes authority in two sentences and stops is stronger than one that keeps going.
What belongs, for fiction
Far less than you think. Nobody has ever bought a novel because of the author's day job.
What you write. Genre, and the kind of thing within it, in the reader's own words rather than the trade's.
Anything genuinely relevant. If you spent nine years as a paramedic and wrote a novel about an ambulance crew, that is worth a clause. If you spent nine years as a paramedic and wrote a fantasy novel, it is not.
One human detail. Where you live, or something true and specific about your life. It makes you a person rather than a byline, and one is the correct number.
What does not belong
A career history. The bio is not a resume. Unrelated jobs, listed in order, read as padding and push the useful sentence to the end.
A degree with no bearing on the book. It suggests you had nothing closer to hand.
The coy third-person joke. "She lives in Bristol with her husband, two children and a wholly unreasonable number of houseplants." Every third author writes a version of that sentence. It is not a personality; it is a genre, and readers stopped reading it years ago.
In the Interior Formatter. The Interior Formatter builds front and back matter from fields, so the bio inside the book is a setting you fill in once rather than a page you lay out by hand — change it, and the About the Author page changes with it. Start your book → · about the Interior Formatter
Third person or first
Third person is the convention for the book itself and the store listing, and conventions like this are worth keeping: it reads as though someone else considered you worth describing, which is the effect you want at the point of sale.
First person suits places that are plainly yours — your own site, your newsletter, the note at the end of a guest post. In those rooms, third person sounds like a press office.
Write both. It is an afternoon, and it spares you converting one into the other at speed while someone waits.
The three lengths
You will be asked for all of them, so write all of them at once.
One line, about fifteen words. For a conference program, a panel listing, a byline. What you write, plus one anchor.
Fifty words. The workhorse. Store author pages, back matter, most requests.
A hundred and fifty. For a press kit, an interviewer's notes, a festival brochure. Room for the second credential and the human detail.
The short ones are not the long one trimmed. Each is written for its slot. Cutting a hundred and fifty words down to fifteen gives you a sentence with the life squeezed out of it.
The debut with nothing to list
No publications, no awards, no platform. This is the case that stalls people for weeks, so here it is answered directly.
Write three things: what you write, where you are, and one true specific thing about yourself. "Ruth Okorie writes crime novels set on the Northumberland coast. She lives in Newcastle and has worked nights for eleven years." That is a complete, professional bio, and no reader will notice anything missing.
What not to do is more important. Do not apologize — no "this is my first novel", no "I have always loved writing", no "I hope you enjoy it". Do not inflate, either: a workshop is not a credential, and a membership anyone can buy is not an achievement. A short confident bio reads as a professional. A padded one reads as a beginner, which is the exact thing you were trying to hide.
Where it lives
The bio turns up in the book's back matter, on your store author page, in your press kit, on your own site, and at the foot of every guest post and interview you ever do.
Keep one master copy, all three lengths in one file, and update it when something changes — a second book, a new job, a move. Then every one of those places is a copy and paste rather than a rewrite, and the version in the wild stops being three years out of date.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The press release, and when it is worth writing · Also useful: The press kit nobody asks for until they do · The back of the book is where your next sale is · Author profiles, and why they are worth an hour