What to Have In Your Query Bio (and What to Leave Out)
The last posts introduced the elements of a query letter: the manuscript summary, the metadata, and the author biography.
So what’s an author biography?
Agents reading your query letter want to know about your writing credentials. They want to know if:
You have relevant educational experience
You’ve written before
You’ve done anything that has helped validate you as a potential career author.
This isn’t publishing a book (in fact, most agents aren’t looking to represent books that have already been self published--see our blog post on this), but instead could be:
Having a book blog
Having a writing-focused twitter account
Having won an essay contest
Having written for the school or local newspaper
Having published an academic article
Etc.
Anything that shows that you take writing seriously and have worked to advance your craft is also great to mention. Have you taken a writing course? Are you active in an online community for writers? Show the agent that you’ve put effort into learning how to write.
So what do agents not want to read in your bio?
Usually the answer to this is: a long digression about your life that isn’t related to your writing cred. For example, it won’t help an agent to make a decision on your query (and your potential to make it as a career author) to read a 200 word paragraph about your two cats and all your side hobbies. Remember, agents are getting hundreds of queries a month. So they want to read something that is short, relevant, and to the point.
But! We do want to make sure that we imbue the author bio with a little bit of personality. I suggest one line at the end of the bio that hints at your uniqueness and personality. So pick one thing—a unique hobby, interest, talent, etc.—and close out your bio with one short and sweet sentence.
One thing I highly recommend never including in a query bio is anything overly personal about you that constitutes personally identifiable information—your phone number, address, the names of your children, your exact place of work, etc. Remember, we hope agents are all trustworthy people, but they’re ultimately strangers when you’re querying, and this is all information that you don’t need a stranger to have on their computer.
Here’s an example of an author biography from the query letter that got me my agent:
While this is my first foray into fiction writing, I’ve published book chapters with Georgetown University Press and Cambridge University press as a PhD student in political science at Columbia University. I enjoy using my academic research on military tactics, power politics, and leadership to enliven and inform my creative writing. When I’m not writing, I enjoy knitting, doing yoga, and being a full-time servant to my two cats.
There’s not a lot of fluff here--it’s 60 words, not my whole life story. It lists where I’ve published as an academic (proof that I can write for a different audience and know something about publishing in a different industry), gives my educational background, and links that education to my writing (something that I hoped would make me stand out to agents). It closes out with a tiny bit of personality to make me seem like a real human. That’s all you need!