Providing author info to websites

The NaNoWriMo website finally “relaunched” and it became possible to provide author information and information about the book I’m planning to write in 30 days during November (along with hundreds of thousands of other participants). So this posting will discuss the process of completing the “Author Information” portion of the profile to earn one of the “Participation Badges.” Here they ask you for your location, your birthday, your hobbies, your favorite music (while writing), your website, your “StayClassy URL” (I didn’t know what that was, and there was no “help” or hint as to its meaning on the website), your occupation, your favorite books or authors, and your author biography.

Over the years at Outskirts Press, we have experimented with asking very few questions of our authors at the initial stages of “getting to know them” and a lot of questions at this initial stage and we have invariably discovered that very few people are comfortable sharing many details about themselves right off the bat, so I was surprised to find questions like these so soon into the NaNoWriMo author process, particularly the birthday, which is a security-risk question that we never ask our authors. I tried to just provide a month and year for my birthday and it forced me to also include the day (so I randomly picked a number).

Anyway, here’s what I put for my author bio:

Hello everyone. This is my first time participating with NaNoWriMo as a writer, although our publishing company, Outskirts Press, is a previous sponsor of National Novel Writing Month. Within 30 days, I hope to successfully write at least 50,000 words (I’m shooting for 65,000) of my comedy-thriller “Idle Hands.”

On a professional note, I have published three non-fiction books (Sell Your Book on Amazon, Self-Publishing Simplified and Publishing Gems: Insider Information for the Self-Publishing Writer), as well as an anthology of short stories, and two children’s books (One Wacky Wasp and Aidan’s Shoes). My personal website is at BrentSampson.com.

As the president and CEO of Outskirts Press, I am actively involved with a number of publishing and writing associations nationwide. I have a feeling time will be in short supply this November, but I hope to have enough left over to participate as much as possible with NaNoWriMo both online and offline.

Speaking of sponsorship, we finally heard back from NaNoWriMo about sponsorship, and they said they were full, which is strange, because according to the little graphic on their website, they appear to be about $700,000 short of their financial goals.