Bio graf

If your credits have a direct bearing on what you write, then you can mention them, otherwise, they don't mean much and take up space.

schamber said:

I'm writing a YA historical novel. I don't have any fictions creds, but I have been published in academic journals and I've won various national essay prizes that are important in my field. Additionally, I majored in the history of the period in which the book is set and I'm now getting a PhD in English lit. Does any of this belong in my bio paragraph? Or should I just omit the bio entirely? I kind of wonder if the academic stuff hurts instead of helping. I may sound like someone who can construct a coherent sentence, or I may sound like Dr. Dryasdust. Could go either way.

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I've always been of the opinion to leave it out.

I did notice Noah Lukeman seemed to have a bit of a hate-on for academics and journalists in his "First 5 Pages"; maybe not a full hate-on, but he didn't count those as positives for being able to write fiction, and mentioned several times that they often lead to folks with certain shortcomings.....specifically academics tended to waffle, refuse to commit, and go off on long, boring side tangents, journalists tended to have issues with summarizing dialogue.

The point is, he is the only agent I saw say anything, but he elaborated on what my gut already said: these are 2 very different types of writing from actual fiction writing, so they don't count. He went on to a length that suggested that worse still, they may feed a certain sort of bias or preconception.

Which is why I won't be mentioning Dept. of Defense grants, writing an article that made it to JBC, etc....I'm a biologist, and if I wrote fiction in the same fashion I write in these things (if not, they don't count as credentials) then my stuff would be shitcanned before the first paragraph ended...

I wouldn't put in an undergrad major; as you no doubt know, being a Ph.D. student around other Ph.D. students, undergrad majors don't count for much in the long run. It's not really specialization in the field the way an MA or Ph.D. is.

If your Ph.D. is on exactly what you're writing about, maybe mention it. But I would probably still leave it out.

Some agents are turned off by academic credentials because they've had bad experiences with authors, and I've yet to see one that goes, "Yes, yes, yes! Tell me all about it!" So at worst, it's a negative, at best, it's something an agent goes, "Meh, okay." From what I've seen, it's not going to be the make or break element in your query. So I'd err on the side of leaving it out.