You’re going to be asked for a bio or the cover image from your book. Or a link to where people can read your work. Every time anyone asks you, they will ask for those same things. So keep them ready.

Spend the time now to write a bio and get your best photo of yourself. Get the cover JPEG from your publisher – or just than it from Amazon. The publisher will have the kind of high resolution images needed for magazine printing but most of the time it’s going to be a website who is asking you and a grab from Amazon is fine. If you don’t grab it from there, they will.

But it’s better if you do it. It is always better. You know you can’t get the wrong image and you know they could. It’s the same with links, it’s even the same with bios: you are only dealing with you but they might be featuring ten people and mistakes happen.

They’re less likely to happen if both you and the magazine or website are organised. You can’t do anything to make them be better prepared but you can do everything to make sure you are.

So schlep through all this writing of bios, select an extract from your writing, get all the right links for your work (remember to get both US and UK links at least), prepare the images and then keep them all in one place.

Specifically Dropbox.

If you sign up for a free Dropbox account you get 2Gb of space to store files in and the ability to send anyone a link to any of them. They get the link and they can click or tap on it to download the lot: it’s not only handy, it’s essential because images can be too big to email directly.

I keep a folder on Dropbox with all my cover images in high and low res versions, copies of my CV tweaked for different markets and some short and long bios plus headshot photos of me.

I tell you, I look at that folder now and I looked at it a lot when I was making it and I fair blush with embarrassment at being so egotistical.

But then I’ll be asked for a bio to go in an event brochure and I’ve sent back exactly what they need before they even noticed they’d hit send. Obviously I like that and obviously it’s useful for them to have this stuff right there.

But there is another reason to do it. Like anything else in my Blank Screen book, I am very much an advocate of spending a little time now to save a lot of it later. You’d think that it would take the same time to write a bio when asked for it as it is to write up one early, but that’s not the time saving.

This is. Last year I did a thing as part of a group and we were all required to provide various bio details and headshots. I replied with it all immediately – and never had to think about it again. Some of my colleagues took days, a fair few took weeks and at least one took months to do the same thing. And you can bet that all the way through those months they were thinking about it. Putting it off, wishing they had done it, telling themselves they’d definitely do it this weekend.

That’s the time you save: all that thinking and procrastinating. That’s why you should do all this now and get it done.

But it is also fun to be able to zap the stuff back to someone when they ask. Bless them for asking, too.