Book Proposal Mountain: Camp Five
How to (constructively) unleash your ego in the author bio of your book proposal
If you’re just joining us, we’re climbing a mountain. And we’re at proper altitude now: for those of you tackling your book proposal in real time, you’ve got an overview pitch, a chapter structure, a market analysis, and a whole dang chapter written at this point. You’re likely sitting on more than 30 hard-earned, polished pages of book proposal material. I hope you’re feeling yourself just a little—you should be! That feeling of accomplishment is one of the main reasons I like to leave the author bio as the last proposal section to finish. This is the moment to temporarily set aside modesty and unleash your ego.
After tackling your sample chapter, the author bio might feel a bit like a gimme, or an afterthought, or simply self-explanatory. You just write about who you are, right? But I encourage you to spend real time and thought on it—while many editors and agents might jump right into the sample chapter of any book proposal they receive, there are definitely others that jump right into the author bio first.
In my opinion, your author bio in your book proposal should be longer than anything you might see in a finished book—it’s truly a full biographical sketch, usually running to two pages or sometimes more. It will likely be longer than anything you’ve written on your own website (if you have one). In fact, when working with authors on a book proposal, I usually ask them to send the longest author bio they have, and we’ll add to it.
The other main reason I like to leave the author bio as the last section to write in a book proposal is that it’s guaranteed to include your absolute up-to-date tilth efforts. In fact . . .
Your author bio is mainly a tilth roundup
Any effective bio should include personal touches that give the reader a sense for your background and personality, but in a nonfiction book proposal, your author bio will also be picked over by editors and agents for tilth potential. I hate to make it sound so extractive, but the reality is that even when an editor falls in love with your project, they have to convince a room of other deciders from sales, publicity, and marketing that the project is worth all of their collective time. Rosy feelings from the editor will only go so far, so if they can lean on the author’s healthy social audience, regular speaking schedule, academic or professional credentials, or extensive professional network, the more likely it is that they’ll carry the day.
To help them out, I find it most effective to package any and all tilth details into the most persuasive author bio possible. To refresh our collective memory, I like to refer to the strength of your public platform as “tilth,” and the key elements of tilth to cover in your author bio are hydration, collaboration, and nutrient supply (which I covered in a bit more detail here).
Nutrient supply
Much of the more obvious material in an author bio is some form of nutrient supply: your academic credentials, career-related awards, official job title, named professorship, and similar professional signifiers not only give editors and agents the most basic of details about your background, they also establish the bona fides that will lay the foundation of your book’s launch.
There are some less-obvious bits of nutrient supply that I recommend highlighting in your author bio as well, however. For example, perhaps there isn’t a clear award that you’ve won, but you’ve been mentioned in some list of entrepreneurs to watch, of promising early- or mid-career professors, of Instagram or TikTok accounts worth following, or something like that. Perhaps you’ve even been profiled at length in an article somewhere—or, if you’re a researcher, perhaps a recent study or paper of yours has been covered in general media outlets. If there’s any public recognition of you or some facet of your work, it’s absolutely worth mentioning or linking to in your author bio.
Don’t be afraid to mention “future” nutrients either! Perhaps you’ve got a career-related development on the horizon (applying for tenure in the fall, starting your own business in the new year, speaking at SXSW next year)—if you’re certain it’s happening, don’t leave it out of your author bio in your book proposal. Keep in mind that your book likely won’t be published for another year or two (or more), so if there is exciting news in the future make sure editors and agents hear about it in your bio.
Collaboration
In your author bio, you gesture at your collaboration strengths in an ancient, time-tested manner: name-dropping. If someone famous (or “book-famous”) has said something nice about you, find a way to get it into the bio. If you’ve published papers with well-known scientists, get it in there.
But in this scenario, name-dropping also refers to the names of organizations. If you’ve done media interviews with national outlets, given presentations at large conferences (or venues like TEDx or Google Talks), or been featured by your university’s public outreach programs, it’s essential to share that in your author bio—it shows the extent of your network, and suggests venues for coverage when your book is eventually launched.
If you’re a journalist, writer, or science communicator, I suggest including a round-up of articles you’ve written for notable publications—this will not only show editors and agents how many connections to big media venues you have, it will also (hopefully) give them a sense for the focus of your coverage, and how well aligned it is to your book topic. (Remember “fit” from “Fit, Fandom, and Freshness”?)
Hydration
Hydration is perhaps the most straightforward of tilth elements to cover in your author bio—it refers to your “owned” communities. If you have thriving social media accounts, link to them in your author bio (and if your follower numbers are small, it might be helpful to add a note about their growth rates). If you have your own newsletter or podcast, get those links in the author bio as well, and be sure to mention any favorable metrics for them (subscribers, downloads, growth month-over-month or year-over-year).
I like to put these hydration-related links at the end of the author bio, because these links (to social media, newsletters, podcasts) are the ones most likely to be clicked on then and there, sending editors and agents away from your book proposal. I think it’s better to send readers to those links only after they know a bit about you and your background.
The one hydration-related exception to all this is—previous books! If you’ve written other books, be sure to include them somewhere earlier in your author bio, and include not only their titles, but their publishers, publication years, and any favorable outcomes (sales figures, multiple print runs, translated editions published internationally).
Let’s get real
That’s all the theory—let’s look at a real author bio out there in the wild. This week, Dr. Marcus Collins has graciously allowed me to share the details of his author bio from his book proposal for For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. (For the Culture is being published by PublicAffairs on May 2, 2023, so if you’re curious at all about how to thrive in a world driven by cultural identity and action, go order it now!)
Dr. Collins kicks off his author bio with an absolute doozy of a paragraph:
Marcus Collins is an award-winning marketer and cultural translator. His deep understanding of brand strategy and consumer behavior has helped him bridge the academic-practitioner gap for blue-chip brands and startups alike. He is a recipient of Advertising Age’s 40 Under 40 award and Crain’s Business 40 Under 40 award, and a recent inductee to the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Achievement. Before serving as Chief Consumer Connections Officer at Doner Advertising, Marcus led Social Engagement at Steve Stoute’s New York-based advertising agency, Translation. There, Marcus developed a practice to create contagious marketing programs that extended across both the online and offline worlds of “social.” His strategies and creative contributions have led to the success of Budweiser’s “Made In America” music festival, the launch of Bud Light Platinum, the launch of the Brooklyn Nets (Hello Brooklyn!), and State Farm’s “Cliff Paul” campaign—among others.
First off, you’ll see Dr. Collins’s bio is in third-person. I have a slight preference toward third-person author bios, for two small-ish reasons: first, if you have a PhD or MD, you can simply start your bio with “Dr.” rather than laying out a full “I have a PhD in . . .” sentence. (Dr. Collins earned his PhD after the book proposal was finished, which is why you don’t see the “Dr.” at the start here.) Second, a third-person author bio remains intact even if taken out of context—that is, if an editor or agent just shares your author bio with colleagues for some reason, it will still have your name in it to keep things absolutely clear.
In this first paragraph, Dr. Collins bounces between nutrient supply and collaboration: he touches on his awards from Advertising Age, Crain’s Business, and the American Advertising Federation, then immediately pivots to his professional affiliations with Doner and Translation. To highlight the prominence of his work, he then closes this first paragraph with a parade of “blue-chip” brand collaborations.
With such a strong start, Dr. Collins is able to spend the next paragraph on his personal background.
As Marcus puts it, “I’ve always been a bit of a square peg in a round hole—I grew up as a black kid in Detroit who swam competitively, loved the Monkees as much as I loved A Tribe Called Quest, and spent my summers at band camp. Among my white peers, I was the ‘blackest’ person they knew. Among my black peers, I was never quite black enough.” The result of these experiences taught him how to observe cultural codes and develop an empathic muscle. His years of training and work have since strengthened these innate abilities into an actionable practice that allows him to translate culture for brands and translate brands for culture.
Notice that even in this more traditional author bio material, Dr. Collins ties his background into the idea for the book, to show that he is THE author best suited to write For the Culture. After connecting more personally with readers, Dr. Collins follows up with an eye-opening statement that displays some big bona fides:
Prior to his advertising tenure, Marcus began in music and tech with a startup he co-founded before working on iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple and running digital strategy for Beyoncé.
This sentence could have come before the personal background material (with the clarity of mental distance, I’m surprised I didn’t suggest it, actually), but regardless of its location Dr. Collins rightly decided it deserved its own paragraph—if you have the chance to mention Beyoncé, you make the most of it!
From here Dr. Collins pivoted to cover another aspect of nutrient supply that he is able to draw on: his academic background.
Beyond his practice, Marcus is also an extremely passionate educator. He is a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and the faculty director for the school’s executive education partnership with Google. During his time at Ross, Marcus has won the Teaching Excellence Award for executive education and the university-bestowed Cornerstone Award. He is also a faculty member at the Harvard Extension School and the Boston University Questrom School of Business.
Academic bona fides can be doubly advantageous in your author bio: first, they hint at potential institutional support for your book. Perhaps your university or department will foot the bill for a book launch party; perhaps they’ll feature it in university publications; perhaps they’ll share a review of the book with their alumni networks; perhaps the school’s public relations office will partner with your publisher’s publicity department to boost coverage for the book. Second, academic expertise is quite appealing for media outlets—not only might they feel reassured that the book’s message is on firm factual footing, the “air time” value of an academic sharing new insights on this or that topic is more readily apparent. If you’ve got past or present academic positions, affiliations, or accolades, don’t hide them under a bushel!
In that same paragraph, Dr. Collins showcases his primary collaboration strength: speaking.
Outside of the classroom, Marcus delivers keynote talks across the globe for companies and conferences such as Cannes Lions International Festival for Creativity, SXSW, Social Media Week, Adcolor, Hyper Island, TEDx, and Talks at Google.
Whatever your main collaboration strength—writing op-eds or articles, appearing on podcasts, regularly speaking at in-person and online events, or something else entirely—I highly recommend at least one sentence like this in your author bio, in which you attempt to overwhelm the reader with a rapid-fire list of your collaborative connections. In my opinion, statements like this can have a wonderful “runaway” effect: with each additional listing—particularly if the list has a healthy ratio of “big-dog” names—my brain becomes more convinced that the author can not only land an opportunity at that particular outlet, but probably at lots of other outlets too. For Dr. Collins specifically, when I see Cannes, SXSW, TEDx, Google, and more in that list, I’m utterly convinced of his ability to speak almost anywhere else too.
(That said, there’s no need to try to force a sentence like this—if your main collaboration strength is a dedicated column at a single major outlet, for example, you can simply highlight that with a series of links to your best pieces. Don’t go scrambling to place op-eds in smaller publications just to pad out your connections.)
Dr. Collins then closes out the prose section of his bio with two final academic bona fides—his MBA degree, and his imminent PhD—and one final brief personal connection.
Marcus holds an MBA with an emphasis on strategic brand marketing from the University of Michigan, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in Materials Science and Engineering, and is a doctoral candidate at Temple University, studying social contagion within cultures of consumption. He is a proud Detroit native, a devoted husband, and loving father to Georgia and Ivy.
After that, he rounds off this comprehensive and impressive author bio with an efficient set of links that show off his hydration strengths (his website, Twitter, and Instagram accounts) as well as a vivid display of his speaking strengths.
Website: www.marctothec.com
TEDxUofM: https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_collins_too_foreign_for_here_the_life_of_a_black_sheep
Highlight reel: https://vimeo.com/453287747
Social: https://twitter.com/marctothec, https://www.instagram.com/marctothec/
Misadventures in author photos
As you can see from the length of this post so far, you’ll have your hands full with the text in your author bio, but your author photo requires a little time and attention as well. (And yes, I suggest including a photo with your author bio—for better or worse, your photo will help make a stronger connection with sighted editors and agents.) There’s no need to get fancy with this—ideally you want something head-on, just head or head-and-shoulders, with great lighting. Here’s what Dr. Collins used:
And while you should absolutely go for something that genuinely captures your personality, I don’t recommend a full-body shot, or some action shot, unless the book is about sports, fitness, or some other body-related topic. For example, don’t use a photo of you in spandex on a bike if you’re writing a book about a career in public service. (Yes, that’s a real one.)
Also: Don’t give your dog more space than you in your author photo unless your dog plays a role in the book. (Yes, that’s a real one.)
Don’t send your library card to your agent or editor to have them scan your photo off of it. (Yes, believe it or not that’s a real one.)
OK, here’s a more useful “don’t”: Don’t use a photo without a photographer credit line unless you purchased the rights to that photo outright, or it was taken by a friend or family member (even then, frankly, you should check with them to see if they want to be credited). And you should be asking the photographer not only for the proper wording for the credit line, but also if they will grant you permission to use the photo in your book proposal. (Permission to use a photo in a book proposal is often easier than securing permission to use the photo in your finished book, since the proposal is only going out to publishing professionals for consideration. But should you get a book deal, and your book is in production, you’ll absolutely want to be sure to clear permission at that time to include the author photo in the book.)
Last, here’s a more encouraging author photo “don’t”: you don’t necessarily have to pay for an expensive professional photo shoot right now—a smartphone photo taken by your friend or partner in good lighting that captures an authentic moment will often do the trick. For example, the photo I use for my profile here on Substack (and on the Curious Minds agency website) was taken by my wife with an iPhone on a sunny day while we were on vacation.
It may feel a bit anticlimactic ending with your author bio, but guess what—we’ve tackled the book proposal, people! It’s no mean feat, so congratulations to you if you’ve pulled it off. From here, we’re going to put this proposal to good use: it’s time to talk agents and book deals.
But before we get there, I’m going to do one more bonus “Book Proposal Mountain” post, about creative, valuable add-ons to your book proposal, and whether it makes sense to try to include any of them. I’ll have that for you in February!
This is so helpful for writing bios in general, even if I’m not writing a book proposal – thank you!