The worst author introduction I ever saw is making me cringe, right now, as I remember it. The co-owner of the bookstore started by reading through the store’s upcoming events flier, pausing to on each event. This took a full 10 minutes. Then she spent 5 minutes talking about the plight of independent bookstores, and how they need money to do things like community book nights, and hey she’s got this newsletter sign-up sheet that she’s going to pass around. And while we’re at it, the store actually has two different email newsletters that they send out, and she described them both in great detail. Another sign-up sheet is passed around.
Having already wasted close to 20 minutes of our time, she launched into a synopsis of the book, interspersed with her own impressions, leaving no secondary character or minor scene unnamed. Worst of all, the book has a rather large twist in the second half, and she was explicitly hinting at what it is. Someone in the audience actually yelled out, “Don’t give it away!” This was advice she did not take.
This is an extreme example, by far the worst I’ve ever seen, but author introduction crimes are rampant. I was recently at a literary festival where at least 10 of the roughly 15 author introductions I saw were painful to sit through. I take this issue seriously because I was an author events coordinator at Brookline Books Mith for two years, and we took pride in our author introductions. The willingness and ability to carefully craft a good author introduction, in fact, was part of my job interview.
Author introductions, in my opinion, are about courtesy. Should a beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning author have to hear the president of Northwestern’s Jewish students’ society call him Michael Sha-BONE eight times in two minutes? No. Because he flew across the country to speak for 50 minutes in your overheated auditorium and you have the internet. A good author introduction shows the author that you’re excited to be a partner in promoting their work and that you value the role their career plays on the literary stage, all while being informative and – lord have mercy – brief.
How To Introduce an Author
Step 1. Find Out Who the Author Is
Get your details straight. Look up the pronunciation of their name, even if you think you know it. If a definitive answer is elusive, ask their publicist, agent, or whoever set up the event with you. Otherwise, ask the author when they arrive, before you hit the microphone with some garbled version of .
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out what books they’ve written. Don’t say that Stay Awake is Dan Chaon’s fifth novel. He’s written two novels, but this is his third story collection. Do you think A History of Love is Nicole Krauss’s first book? Wrong! Look it up. If you find yourself introducing someone like Michael , who’s written novels, short stories, essays, comic books, and children’s books, just avoid taxonomy and say he’s prolific.
Find out what awards they’ve won, where they teach (currently), and what periodicals they write for. More on this later.
you haven’t had time to do your research, don’t guess, and definitely don’t — as I saw someone do last weekend — turn to Kevin Brock Meier in the middle of your introduction and say “Is The View From the Seventh Layer a novel?” I shudder.
Step 2. Weed Out Unnecessary/Unimpressive Details
So you’ve printed out the author’s Wikipedia entry. Don’t include the fact that they teach creative writing part-time at Eastern Nevada State. Don’t mention that they won the Central North Carolina Writer’s Prize. Don’t say that they were included on Entertainment Weekly’s 100 Authors to Watch list.
These details do two things — they make the author look small-time, and they give the impression that you’re desperate for any scrap of information to fill out your introduction.
Which Brings Us to Step 3. Include Personal Impressions
Personal impressions of the author’s work should be the bulk of your introduction. Ideally, they will be your personal impressions. During my first year as an events coordinator, I read each author’s book before I hosted their event, a unnecessary gesture with enormous dividends.
Firstly, it is yet another step you can take to avoid looking like an idiot. The room is full of people who’ve most likely come to hear the author because they’ve read their work. It’s embarrassing when the person at the microphone is the