The nine items

One-line pitch, under 25 words. Paragraph pitch, under 100. Cover art at 300 dpi and also as a web-sized file. Author photo, landscape and square. Bio at 25, 75 and 150 words — reviewers cut to length, and if you have not chosen the cuts they will.

Publication details: title, ISBN, format, page or runtime, publisher, release date. Buy links for every edition. One contact address that is checked. And a sample — an excerpt for print, a retail sample for audio, a cut for a film book.

Present it as a page with downloadable assets, not a 40-megabyte attachment. A booker deciding at 11pm will take whatever can be reached in two clicks and skip whatever needs an email.

What almost everyone forgets

Runtime, for audio and film editions. A podcast booker and a reviewer both need it before they will commit.

A pronunciation note for your own name and your two or three strangest proper nouns. Every interviewer is grateful and almost nobody supplies it.

Permission, stated plainly: what may be reproduced, at what size, and whether the cover may be cropped. A press kit that says yes in advance gets used more than one that requires a conversation.

Where it should live

On a page of your own, at a URL that does not change, indexable, with the assets beside it. Not in a cloud folder that expires and not behind a form.

This house keeps a press kit forge and a public provenance seal for exactly this: a page a reviewer can check, with the production facts stated and the assets in hand.

Asked and answered

How long should the bio be?

Write three: 25, 75 and 150 words. Every outlet has a different hole to fill.

Do I need a professional author photo?

You need a well-lit one at usable resolution, landscape and square. Studio work is optional; a dark phone snapshot is not usable.

Should the press kit be a PDF?

Offer one, but lead with a web page. PDFs cannot be indexed usefully and cannot be updated after they are downloaded.