We’ve all been there. Have you ever been stressed out about a performance, only to receive a dreaded email like this?

“Hi [You],

We need your bio by 6pm yesterday. Please send at your earliest convenience so that you can be included in our program for your Huge Performance Opportunity.

Thanks,

Admin” 

If you have, you know what comes next: stress. I don’t know where my bio is—is it in Google Drive? A flash drive somewhere? Did I send it in an email to someone else a couple years back?—and I haven’t even touched it since my junior recital. Even if I can find it it’s probably terrible, I have to edit it.

The anxiety.

The annoyance at having to slave over emails when you should be focusing on music.

All of this takes away from performing at your peak. It’s why top 1% artists like Renée Fleming and Barbara Hannigan and Itzhak Perlman have managers: so they can focus on what they do best.

But you’re the 99% and don’t have management. So you spend two hours and re-write it—spending a bunch of time slaving away, wondering if you should include this thing or not include that thing—and send a good enough, but 100% unmemorable bio just in time for the deadline. But of course, you don’t save it anywhere, so you’re doomed to repeat this process the next performance, and the next, and the next…

Or, you hired me, and were able to simply take 20 seconds and reply with:

(Yes, that link is real.)

And voila! Zero stress, zero anxiety, 100% focus.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned after talking to and working with hundreds of artists at a nationally-recognized classical music venue: a shocking number of artists walk around with a bio written when they were a student, or one they wrote, like the above, in a rush between gigs so that it could get printed on a program on time.

It’s a waste of creative energy, and I want you to have a life where you can focus 100% on your music.

So, I propose to write your bio for you—one that’s damn good, clear, NOT wordy or pretentious, but gets audiences and reviewers excited for your shows.

You work with me, and you’ll have the perfect bio ready for any occasion. You can have me improve your existing one if you feel like yours is solid, or I can go straight from the ground up and create something totally new. You can even get the full, “artist management” suite with a 100 word, 250 word, and 500 word bio so you never have to think about your bio again.

It’s a no-brainer, but there are people reading who aren’t convinced. Why would I pay for this when I could just do it myself? 

 

 

WHY WORK WITH ME?

My name is John Hong. I play the clarinet, but I’m more than just a clarinetist. Since graduating with a Master’s Degree from Juilliard, I’ve performed with the American Ballet Theatre, on television soundtracks, and premiered work by incredible composers, including Caroline Shaw.

But I’ve also “gone undercover”:

• I’ve written professionally on topics from James Levine’s crimes at the Met to exploring the unconventional “success formulas” of exciting young artists
• I’ve written compelling “I-have-to-see-that” event descriptions for sold out shows
• I’ve written 3,000 word press releases, receiving news coverage ranging from The New York Times to a nationally-televised feature in Japan (NHK)
• I’ve written massively viral content on my personal blog, which was shouted out by The Washington Post in 2016

Performance. PR. Marketing. Blogging. Journalism.

I’m a writer with proven results and experience just about everywhere.

And honestly?

It’s taken me YEARS to develop this knowledge.

Even for me, a “good writer” with access to the world’s greatest performers at Juilliard, the bio I wrote in college was terrible… including when the “experts” looked at it.

My bio was stale. A total snoozefest. It emphasized irrelevant things, like awards from high school and college (is this you?) that I now know no high profile booker cares about, and made amateur hour moves like listing every single festival I’d ever done as a block text in one paragraph. (Free tip: this is bad)

But now, after years of in-the-field experience working and performing in the arts, my perspective has totally shifted. I’ve worked “behind the scenes” at a nationally-recognized non-profit music venue…

I’ve seen firsthand how whip-smart arts administrators and marketers look at a great musician’s amateur bio and say: “I don’t even know what this person does.”

The thing is, a lot of these artists have absolutely stunned me live, but their bios don’t at all reflect what their audiences find special, and what would pique the curiosity of a hotshot programmer or booker.

THE PROCESS

1. I learn about you. I read your existing bio, existing resume, or if you don’t have either, we simply jump on the phone.
2. I write about you. I write a bio handcrafted to what we talk about.
3. You give me feedback. Want to change something? Forgot something?
4. VOILA: You have professional bios, ready to use for any occasion. Never will you have to waste hours of your life figuring out a 100 word bio or 250 word bio last minute when you could have just pointed them to your website.

I’ll be real with you—most artists won’t use professional bio editing.

They’ll be content with whatever they cooked up in college, or what their old teacher, manager, or agent (who, in my experience, often can’t write that well either) helped them with.

And the thing is, they miss out. With a good bio, you’ll have:

• A clear vision for you or marketers at music venues to use to get audiences in seats (and more $$$ in your bank account)
• A fantastic first impression. After working a music venue for two years, bad bios are expected and ignored, but good ones get the audience buzzing about the right things before the show.
• A strong identity so your audiences will be able to talk about you to other people easily.