YEARS before I became a published author, I’d heard about author questionnaires, and nothing I’d heard about them was good. Writers whose books lined my shelves often tweeted about having to complete these long and sometimes outdated documents provided by their marketing and publicity teams, and when I finally sat down in front of my own, I understood their frustration. Shortly after I finished multiple rounds of edits for my debut poetry collection, I received my own multipage form, which included questions about my work and publication histories, the groups of people I thought would be most interested in purchasing my book, and one of the more harrowing inquiries: “Has any article or story of yours attracted particular attention?”
As an early-career writer I felt woefully inadequate for the task. Did it matter that I had yet to write anything that had gone viral? What if my number of interesting hobbies had shrunk in the years since I began working on my collection? What if I personally knew only one or two booksellers in the city where I now lived, and they, like me, were not famous but fellow writers with whom I commiserated about rejections and writer’s block?
For many writers, I suspect author questionnaires are hated, not solely for their length, but also for the ways they require us to enumerate our past accomplishments and current connections and to predict the potential commercial value of our work. Also, after many submissions and
