You’ve sat down to write your own bio and stared at the cursor. You’ve written three sentences about yourself in the third person and deleted all of them. Everything true about your work comes out sounding either grandiose or like a résumé.
That’s normal. It’s hard to find the throughline in your own life’s work — you’re too close to connect the dots. I see constellations where others only see stars.
You may have handed it to ChatGPT by now. What came back was grammatical and wooden — a carbon copy of everything else on the internet. It can only rearrange what you already told it. It can’t find what you didn’t.
WHY ME
My qualification here isn’t a literary one.
I’m a booking agent. Artist bios arrive in my inbox by the dozen and I decide, fast, whether I understand who’s in front of me. Most of them fail at exactly that — they list accomplishments and never say what the person actually is. I know what a bio has to do because I’m the one it has to do it to.
So I don’t write bios to make you sound impressive. I write them to make you legible — to a talent buyer, a journalist, a festival programmer, a stranger with fifteen seconds and two hundred other emails.
I’m also a musician, which means I won’t ask you to describe your sound in marketing language, and I’ll know what you mean even when you don’t.
HOW IT WORKS
Research. Then a long interview. Then a first draft, then a round of revisions.
I’m less a copywriter than a copy architect. I write bios modularly, so each paragraph stands on its own two feet and can be recombined like Lego. You end up with a long version for your website, a short one for a press release, and two sentences for a festival program — all from the same pieces, all sounding like one person.
WHAT IT COSTS
$399, start to finish. Research, the interview, the first draft and a round of revisions. Two weeks from the interview.
WHO IT’S FOR
Mostly musicians and bands. Occasionally someone else whose work is hard to explain in a sentence.
Not ready? I wrote this free guide to writing a better bio — what it has to do, what order to put things in, and the mistakes nearly everyone makes.
“Jayme was a huge help in re-writing a punchier bio for my band, Hot Buttered Rum. He helped me quickly pinpoint a central metaphor and find wording that resonated with me, as well as my manager, bandmates and publicist.”
“I dread writing bios for myself, so I never expected the process of having Jayme write my bio to be so much fun. Not only was it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, I love the result — my bio is as unique as the music I make.”
“I was struggling to write objectively about my story and find a way to put a lot of big ideas together succinctly. Jayme interviewed me with genuine curiosity and crafted a beautiful bio — he even unearthed some new ideas and meaning behind what I’d been trying to say but couldn’t find the words. A huge help and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.”
“Jayme’s gift of getting to the heart of my story and drawing it out with colorful, concise and compelling prose helped me frame my project: not only to the outside world but also to myself.”
“Jayme is a bio-whisperer.”
