Tips for Writing Author Page Bio/Notes

Author Bio Examples

Scroll down to the bottom for an example of What to Do When There's No Bio on the Amazon Author Page, Wikipedia, the Author's Website or Anywhere Else

Author: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon 

Amazon Author Central Page Bio:

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The New York Times best sellers Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. She is also a contributor to Atlantic Media's Defense One site. In 2004 she left ABC News to earn her MBA at Harvard, where she began writing about women entrepreneurs in conflict and postconflict zones, including Afghanistan and Rwanda. Following MBA study she served as a vice president at the investment firm PIMCO. She has written for Newsweek, the Financial Times, and the International Herald Tribune, as well as for the World Bank and Harvard Business School. Her 2011 TED Talk was a TED Talk of the Day A Fulbright scholar and Robert Bosch fellow, Gayle speaks Spanish, German, French and is conversant in Farsi.

Example Bio for BookGorilla Author's Page

Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's books shine a light on the achievements and struggles of women entrepreneurs in conflict and postconflict zones around the world. You've seen her on ABC News and TED Talks and read her work on Atlantic Media's Defense One site and in Newsweek, the Financial Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Now you can follow her long-form reporting on her BookGorilla Author's Page.

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Author: Agatha Christie

Amazon Author Central Page Bio:

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

Example Bio for BookGorilla Author's Page

You can call her Dame Agatha.... You can call her Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie.... You can even call her Lady Mallowan, DBE.... But to us she'll always be the Queen of Crime. Beginning with her debut as a 30-year-old mystery novelist in 1920 she has peopled over 80 novels and collections with some of the most unforgettable sleuths ever, including, most notably, the beloved Miss Marple and detective Hercule Poirot. If you want to keep up with her work on Kindle, there's no better place to do that than right here on her BookGorilla Author's Page. 

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Author: William Stevenson

Amazon Author Central Page Bio: None

Wikipedia Bio:

William Henry Stevenson (1 June 1924 – 26 November 2013) was a British-born Canadian author and journalist.[1]

His 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid was about William Stephenson (no relation) and was a best-seller (see the Stephenson article for more). It was made into a 1979 mini-series starring David Niven and Stevenson followed it up with a 1983 book titled Intrepid's Last Case. He published his autobiography in 2012.

Stevenson set a record with another 1976 book, 90 Minutes at Entebbe.[2] The book was about Operation Entebbe, an operation where Israeli commandos secretly landed at night at Entebbe Airport in Uganda and succeeded in rescuing the passengers of an airliner hi-jacked by Palestinian militants, while incurring very few casualties. The remarkable record in that pre-internet age is that Stevenson's "instant book" was written, edited, printed and available for sale within weeks of the event it described.[3][4]

Example Bio for BookGorilla Author's Page

Long before the Kindle dramatically shortened the period of time necessary for publishing and distributing a full-length book, William Stevenson (1924-2013) set an "instant book" record of sorts when he brought out his bestselling 1976 account of Operation Entebbe in a matter of weeks. His bestseller <i>A Man Called Intrepid</i> was adapted as a mini-series starring David Niven in the title role of William Stephenson, who was no relation to the late British-born author.

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What to Do When There's No Bio on the Amazon Author Page, Wikipedia, the Author's Website or Anywhere Else

Author: A B Lee

Amazon Author Central Page Bio: None

Wikipedia Bio: None

Quick and Easy Solution: On the Amazon Author Central Page, use the pulldown menu near the upper right to sort the listings by "Most reviews:"

Select the book with the most reviews, which is Finding A Home with 32. Click on the 
(32) reviews, then quickly find the review which hits the best sweet spot between being positive (5 stars is good) and being relatively literate, and use these ingredients to create a bio/note like this:

A B Lee's 2014 Lycan novella Finding a Home garnered 5 stars from Amazon reviewer Karli, who wrote: 

"Anna has been raised to avoid and fear Lycans. But when she heals the Alpha' s gravely injured sister, she is brought to his attention. Nick quickly realizes Anna is his mate, but in two days he is to enter into an arranged marriage with the daughter of a neighboring pack's Alpha. The Mating will forge an alliance between the two packs against a power hungry Alpha who is intent on being king. Nick chooses pack over mate and sends her away, but Fate refuses to be denied.  

"This is easily my favorite LR to date. Snark is minimal, the H/h are respectful of each other, and there is plenty of action and suspense with the psycho Alpha trying to take over. It is a winner."

Manual for Checking and Creating BookGorilla Author Pages: Sue Katz

Manual for Checking and Creating BookGorilla Author Pages
Sue Katz

• Log in to the BookGorilla Admin Control Panel (user: admin - password: g8CrFu49 ) and open the BookGorilla New Author Page entry form and the Manage author pages. Open your BookGorilla Author Pages Worksheet - 2013-2014 Promotions.
• Start with ASIN number for a title and use it to initiate an Amazon search
• Click on the author link and extract the author ASIN from the resulting URL (If there are no linked versions of the author's name on that list, stop working on that author and type or paste "No Amazon Author Central Page" next to the author's name on your BookGorilla Author Pages Worksheet - 2013-2014 Promotions.
• Click on that linked version of the author's name on the list of Amazon titles that comes up, and it should take you to the author's Amazon Author Central Page. 
• On the author's Amazon Author Central Page, grab the 10-digit ASIN (B00..., but not a Book ASIN!) from that page's URL. 
• On the BookGorilla New Author Page entry form, enter that 10-digit author ASIN where indicated and click "Submit."  If the next screen shows this message, the author's BookGorilla Author Page already exists: 
  

• If the author's BookGorilla Author Page already exists, mark an X in the "Previously in database column" on the author's line on your BookGorilla Author Pages Worksheet - 2013-2014 Promotions,  and enter the link to that author's BookGorilla Author's Page in the "New Author Page link" column. 
• If, instead, the the next screen shows this message, it will mean that you have just created the a new BookGorilla Author Page for the author: 
  
• In either case, you will have arrived at the "Amend Author Page" screen, where you should check on the following things:
• If there's no Twitter handle showing, add a Twitter handle in the indicated field if there's one shown on the author's Amazon Author Central Page, either in the bio or the "Author Updates" section.
• If there's no author photograph, look for one to add and add it by using the "Copy Image URL" right-click feature and pasting the image URL into the Custom Image URL field. (If custom URL doesn’t work, it may be too long. You can always run it through bit.ly and try again.) Ideally, images should be portrait rather than landscape and, if not available on the author's Amazon Author Central Page, should come from a source such as an author's website, Twitter or Facebook page, or a Wikipedia listing.  If you add an image from a third-party source, add a small-print image credit at the bottom of the author's bio. Example: <br /><div><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image credit: www.ermamuseum.org.</span></div>. As a last resort, you can always use a cover image from one of the author's most prominent books.
• If you're working with a previously existing author page and the bio is substantially different from that on the author's Amazon Author Central Page, not just a shorter or truncated version of that on the author's Amazon Author Central Page, you can leave it as is.
• Otherwise, instead of using the bio from the author's Amazon Author Central Page, write a brief bio that is a little bit snappy and unique to BookGorilla, and ideally no longer than 150 words. This bio or note will be entered in the Free Format Text field. See this page for some ideas. Our goal is to feature a brief bio or note that attracts readers without getting in the way of the books themselves, and that avoids the bad SEO practice that would be created if we just left the content imported from the author's Amazon Author Central Page. It's fine to cover some of the same territory, but we need the verbiage to be unique. 
• Don't work too hard at any of this. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Bang it out in a few moments and move on.
• Before you move on, enter the date, your initials and the Twitter handle (if available) in the appropriate places on  your BookGorilla Author Pages Worksheet - 2013-2014 Promotions.

• There will occasionally be listings on your BookGorilla Author Pages Worksheet - 2013-2014 Promotions for which the authors simply will not have an Amazon Author Central page, or for which there's absolutely nothing of interest and we won't want to create a BookGorilla Author's Page. No problem. Just type or paste "no author page on Amazon" in the column labeled "New Author Page link."

Other Tips

• If for any reason you need to "privatize" or hide any BookGorilla Author's Page, you can just uncheck the "Published" box on the "Amend author pages" screen for that page.
• Be sure to click "Save" often while you are working so that you don't have to repeat your work.
• You can always right click on "Preview" to see what a  BookGorilla Author's Page will look like at any point in your process.
• Never use bit.ly links to shorten the link to a specific BookGorilla Author's Page.
• You can use a limited amount of HTML to improve the appearance of the author bio, mainly <br/><br/> as a double hard return to create a paragraph division, or <i> ... </i> to italicize a title.

Updating, Adding and Excluding Books

• The first time you bring up an Amend author page for a newly created BookGorilla Author's Page, it is likely that the "amend" page will show this message: No books for that author in the database. If you click "Update Books" on the "amend page," books should begin to appear. 
• Aside from the step just mentioned, don't worry too much about this process of Kindle book listings propagating to a newly created BookGorilla Author's Page. Be aware that only Kindle formatted books should display on a BookGorilla Author's Page.
• If you have reason to believe that a large number of the author's English-language full-length books are not appearing on her BookGorilla Author's Page, please send Steve an email with "Books not displaying on author page" in the subject line and a link to the BookGorilla Author's Page in the email body. 
• To manually add books to a BookGorilla Author's Page,  enter the book's ASIN under Add a missing book ASIN to the DB and click on Add book. (Book may not appear right away.) You can also use the Check and Ban/Unban Books feature to try to refresh a book in the BookGorilla database.
• You should exclude foreign language books and free previews/samples (not free full-length books!) from displaying. To exclude a title, just click on Exclude for that title.