Telling Readers All About You

How much should your readers know about you? In this age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, when everything private is public, is it necessary to reveal every detail?

Before social media and even before the internet, authors were mysterious. Each one seemed like a magical wizard living in some unknown and hidden cave. A publisher would release a book, but readers wouldn’t know anything about the wizard, and publishers wouldn’t tell what they knew.

In those days, you could read the ‘About...