OVERSELLING: REBECCA SKLOOT Below is an example of unnecessary overselling. Rebecca Skloot wrote a major bestseller (Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), but she mentions all sorts of nonsense in this bio that no reader will care about. You get the “doth protest too much” vibe from this. Compare this to Tim Ferriss, who also lists a lot but does so quickly and gets out of the way. Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine and guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught creative nonfiction and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than ten years to research and write, and became an instant New York Times bestseller. She has been featured on numerous television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Her book has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appear- ing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many others. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com, and a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; O, The Oprah Magazine; the New York Times; Washington Post; US News & World Report; and numerous others. RIDICULOUS OVERSELLING: DINESH D’SOUZA I’ll end with one of the worst bios I’ve ever seen. This is a real bio, pulled off the Amazon page of his recent book. It is over 500 WORDS of preposterously insecure and arrogant crap. I can’t imag- ine reading this bio and not respecting the author LESS afterward: Dinesh D’Souza has had a 25-year career as a writer, scholar, and hOW TO WriTE yOUr AUThOr BiO (AND Why iT MATTErS) · 263