My Book Blog

The Multiple Types of Author Profiles for the Digital Age

Your author bio is one of the most important tools you have when it comes to promoting your books. When someone reads one of your books, they will seek out your author bio, but people that are thinking about reading your books might also look at your bio and try to decide whether or not to buy. But these days, you need to have a bunch of different bios prepared for the various places to post them on the web. Let’s talk about six different types of bios that you might have to create.

Twitter

You are definitely going to need a bio for Twitter. But there are a limited number of characters that you can use for your Twitter profile, so you’ll need to come up with something short and concise. You still want to give enough relevant information for people to know that you are an author – unless you are so well known that it is common knowledge – but you need to keep it short.

Other Social Media

Luckily, other social media outlets have more space to list your profile. For example, author bios on Instagram or Facebook can be a paragraph or so. You still have to be relatively concise, but you don’t have to list just the bare minimum details that you would when putting your author bio on Twitter. You should use the maximum amount of space on social media if you can.

Magazine By-Line

When it comes to magazine by-lines, you might have even less than Twitter. A magazine byline may just give you a single, short sentence; two at the most. “Your bio may read something like: John Doe is an author of 3 horror novels and lives in Tallahassee with his wife and two kids.” There isn’t much space so make sure that you are including the most important things.

Amazon Author Page

Your Amazon Author page is a little different because you have a lot more space in order to work. However, you do want to keep in mind that even though there is plenty of space on the actual Amazon author page, there is going to be limited amount of space on each page of your book listings.

Your Website “About” Section

You should have plenty of room to include as much information as you want on your about section of your personal website. You can include several paragraphs of detail on your website page, because people are only going to visit your site if they are really curious about you and want to find out a lot more.

Book Proposal Bio

The one place where you should list everything you can is whenever you are creating an author bio for a book proposal. You want to make sure that you list all of your relevant experience, education, awards and more so that a publisher or an agent will have the confidence of your expertise when it comes to determining whether they are going to represent or publish your book.