A Business of Writing Panel Presentation
The “author platform” can be a slippery concept to explain. At its essence, it means an author’s ability to sell books because of who they are or who they can reach.
Agents and publishers often seek writers with platforms for the simple reason that authors who are more visible to their readers and to the general public sell more books. For writers, this means that building a platform—by growing a social media following, publishing articles and stories, practicing good literary citizenship, etc.—is often an important step along the way to publishing a book; and it’s an especially important aspect of marketing a self-published book.
In this panel, authors Elissa Altman, Lynn Steger Strong, Arisa White and Marpheen Chan will discuss how they built their platforms. They will address their experiences across social media, including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as creating a podcast, publishing articles and stories, other methods they have found particularly effective (or ineffective) for connecting with potential readers, and answer audience questions.
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Elissa Altman is the critically-acclaimed, James Beard Award-winning author of three memoirs: Motherland: A Memoir of Life, Loathing, and Longing; Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw; and Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking. Her next book, On Permission, is coming from Godine in 2024. The 2023 Barnswallow Books Writer-in-Residence, and recipient of a 2023 Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency, Altman's work has appeared everywhere from Orion to The Guardian, Tin House to O: The Oprah Magazine, Lion’s Roar, Krista Tippett’s On Being, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. A finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir and the 2020 Maine Literary Award in Memoir, she teaches the craft of memoir widely, from Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown to The Loft Literary Center, and beyond. She divides her time between midcoast Maine and Connecticut.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida.
A native New Yorker living in central Maine, Arisa White is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at Colby College and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. She is also an advisory board member for Gertrude and a community advisory board member for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Arisa co-authored, with Laura Atkins, Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a middle-grade biography in verse that was awarded the Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature, Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal for Multicultural Juvenile Nonfiction. Her current publications are the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy and the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, co-edited with Miah Jeffra and Monique Mero and published by Foglifter Press.
As a gay, first-generation Asian American born in California to a Cambodian refugee family and later adopted by an evangelical, white working-class family in Maine, Marpheen uses a mix of humor and storytelling to help people view topics such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through an intersectional lens. Chann lives in Portland, Maine. He works in the nonprofit and advocacy sector and holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Maine and a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law.
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