How to Write Superb Author Bios

If you have an online presence, you’d always need to have an author’s bio- for your blog, your website or other pages where your work can be viewed. In fact, at the back of almost every book, you are bound to find an author’s bio, which is what a lot of people read before even opening the book.

Your bio has to be stellar; and here’s why: it gives readers an inkling of who you are, in summary. It gives us a snapshot of whom you really are or what message you are trying to convey. Thus, it has to be carefully crafted, so as to create the right kind of first impression.

In this post, we’d be giving a few tips to help create an awesome author’s bio for your page.

The Perfect Opening Statement

Your opening statement casts a shadow over your entire bio. If it’s wrong, then that is exactly how people will see you as. For instance, if it describes your personal life mainly, you just might come across as unprofessional and paint the wrong image of yourself.

The perfect opening statement should be crafted carefully; ensuring that through the lenses of your readers, you are seen as a professional individual who can handle whatever is thrown his or her way, or whom they would like to hear his or her views. In other words, you cant be careless about your opening statement.

Keep it short

While in school, there was this lecturer who told us to compartmentalize our reading into ‘Must know’, ‘Should know’ and ‘May know’, meaning that we didn’t obviously need to know everything in the textbook to pass an examination (well, sometimes, more ‘may know’ questions were in the examination than ‘must know’ questions, but that’s beside the point). What’s the point I’m driving at? Not everything should be in your bio, and if it helps, you can compartmentalize the information which you have about yourself into the above three compartments.

What Must we know about you? In other words, what are the critical bits of information which you absolutely have to pass across?

What should we know about you? What are those spicy or rather nice bits of information which can help us picture your personality and level of professionalism? These bits of information can be passed across in a subtle manner (e.g. ‘She loves to write fiction’ can be crafted as ‘The writing of fictional pieces holds a dear place in her heart’.)

What may we know about you, and if we don’t know this, how much of a negative impact will it   have?

Know why you are writing it

There are several reasons for which you may have to write a bio- ranging from a bio for social media pages, to one for a job application, to one for being a guest blogger or on your own blog. Armed with the reason for which you’re penning down this bio, you can then craft one which is of the suitable length and content.

For instance, a bio to pitch for a freelancing job would be more targeted at stating your accomplishments in that particular field, as well as your openness and availability to work with people. Knowing this, you can then craft a bio with such in mind.

Ensure it contains relevant information

Relevant information such as your name, email address, website URL, as well as your competence in whatever field you’re in, would go a long way to foster trust in the heart of a reader and keep the person hooked to your page.

Write it like it wasn’t written by you

Yes, most likely, your bio, especially if it’s for a page, website or book, will be written by you. Yet, most of the time, it has to look like it wasn’t written by you, more like it was written by a third party. For instance, instead of saying ‘I like to read novels and stay indoors during the weekends.’, you can say something like this ‘He likes to stay indoors, savoring a new book, or generally re-fueling himself for the next day’. Even if that example doesn’t apply to you, most effective bios tend to be written in the third person perspective- somehow, this tends to look more objective.

Keep it personal

A bio without even a little of something personal, something humorous or just something that sparks curiosity in the mind of the reader can be a little too bland. When writing an author bio, try to juice it up with maybe a phrase or sentence which speaks about your personality.

Update your bio

We are all on a journey, and along this journey, we grow and evolve into better individuals, and so do our skills. This is why you need to update your bio. The fact that you wrote a perfect bio which describes you completely 2 years ago, doesn’t mean it would still be perfect for you this year. Thus, updating your author’s bio is something you need to become really comfortable doing, especially as you enter into new phases of your life, especially in your career.