Your Amazon Biography Isn't About You

What I discovered setting up an Amazon author page.

Oops. I completely forgot to properly set up my Amazon author page. So don't be like me, coming up with a description after publishing four books…

You can write this ahead of time, ready to upload when you publish your first book.

This feels backwards until it doesn't. The author exists as soon as you're writing. The biography names what's already taking place.

Amazon gives you 1000 characters. Promotional language often gets flagged, and stuff that goes stale like launch dates or current projects gets outdated quickly.

Your network already knows you. They'll buy your book because they trust what comes through you. But people finding you through search, through Amazon's algorithms, through recommendations are meeting you for the first time. Your book description and this small biography are all they have to go on.

Many author biographies read like resumes. Where you studied, what you achieved, who endorsed you. But someone browsing Amazon only wants to sense what reading you feels like. Whether your way matches what they're looking for.

As soon as you think "now I have to sit down and figure this out," you're already overthinking it. The biography wants to be simple and direct. It's describing what already happens when people read your work.

I wrote mine in third person. Creates a little distance between the one writing and the one being written about. Here's what I ended up with:

Youri Hermes writes conversational books. They point toward what's already happening beneath our questions.

His first three books each offer a different entry point into living freely:

1. 'Enlightenment: no refunds!' invites you into 77 short and playful dialogues between your imagined self and your actual nature. It doesn't explain enlightenment at all. It loosens the grip of needing to chase it, making it instantly available.

2. 'Not your responsibility' shares 60 interventions across 10 transformations, each one opening a new way of relating to life's tension and pressure. It explores how responsibility can arise naturally, without being something you carry.

3. 'Insert life-changing title here' offers the relief of not solving life, and playing with it anyway. It's for anyone exhausted by self-improvement who still wants to engage fully with what's here.

These books can be read in any order. Each one stands on its own and reflects a different way of returning to what you already are.

4. The fourth book, The Art of Unwriting, looks behind the scenes. It explores how writing unfolds when there's no one managing the process. It's especially relevant for those feeling a book inside them, wondering how to begin, or whether they need to.

Explore wherever interest takes you. The writing asks for nothing, explains nothing, and trusts that something will land right where it belongs.

It focuses on what readers experience rather than what I accomplished. "Invites you into," "offers the relief of," "it's for anyone exhausted by." The biography becomes a bridge between their current experience and what they might find in the books.

The biography appears on every book page, not just your author profile. Amazon uses it in recommendations, in search results. People often read it after they've read your book description, when they're deciding whether to trust you with their time.

You can update it anytime. It doesn't have to capture everything you've ever written or want to write. Just what helps someone understand what they're getting into.