I’m preparing for a presentation Saturday and have been lining up talks for my 2013 calendar. In the process, I noticed that my list of possible presentation ideas was kind of sparse. I decided it was time to add to my repertoire. So I came up with around ten new, hopefully, intriguing speech titles. Once my webmaster posts them at my website, I’ll have approximately 20 speech topics program chairpersons and conference directors can choose from.
Do you have trouble coming up with speech themes related to your book? Remember, if you are promoting a book, live presentations are among the best promotional activities for most people. Why? Because personality sells books.
If your book is nonfiction—a how-to, self-help, informational, reference book, you should be able to come up with dozens of speech topics. Presumably, each chapter represents a subject you could talk about and maybe even each heading within each chapter. Additionally, you can consider new information on the topic of your book, angles and perspectives that occur to you or that are presented by others, new experiences within the realm of this subject and so forth. You can also glean presentation ideas from the articles you write on the topic and your blog posts.
For example, you know I write books, articles and this blog on writing, publishing and book promotion. Here are some of my speech titles:
• The Psychology of the Book Proposal
• Book Marketing for the Reluctant Fiction Author
• How to Be CEO of Your Book
• How to Prepare for the Business of Authorship
• How to Sell More Books at Your Next Book Event
• Is Your Book Really a Good Idea?
• 10 Book Promotion Activities You Must Pursue and Why
• 25 Reasons Why You Should Write That Book
• A Dozen Surprising Ways to Successfully Promote Your Ebook
• Platform-Building Tips and Techniques for the Author
For fiction, you may want to tell part of the story in your book, talk about what led up to writing the book, some of your experiences while conducting research for your book, some of your characters and how you developed them, how the characters in your historical novel might react to technology or language or communication in today’s world. You might present some trivia related to the theme of your novel, have audience members participate in acting out part of your story or discuss an aspect of one of your nonfiction hooks.
What is a nonfiction hook? This is an aspect of your book that you can use to promote it, such as the fact that one character is autistic, the period or region where the story is set, the industry involved, a character’s hobby, etc.
If you want to speak on behalf of your book—and you should—spend some time fleshing out at least three possible programs you could present. Add more as you go along. Not only will this get you invited back to speak to the same group more often, but it will widen the horizons of speaking possibilities for you.
People love lists – 5 easy ways, 10 thing you should do – it makes the topic a managable size and easy to remember. You came up with some good ideas for new topics.