Sneak preview of my new book
I don’t think I’ ve ever seen amazon.com do this before, but if you head over now to the listing for Confessions of a public speaker, you’ll see a special link to some sample chapters from the book.
Hope you like them – if you do, help spread the word or pre-order now.
Nice, looks like all of chapters two and three.
Being the obsessive sort that I am, though, I’m going to feel very guilty about having skipped past chapter one and gone straight into chapter two.
Could you give us a one or two sentence hint of what happened in the first chapter?
-mpg
Hi
Looks comprehensive. When one truly thinks about it, it seems a little odd to be afraid of public speaking. I am certainly not fond of it – can’t say I would rather die though ;)
I once saw an interview with Madonna and, like Bono, she also said how nervous she is on the day of a concert. Apparently she can’t eat more than half a bagel for breakfast because of nerves.
Juliet
mpg: Chapter one is titled “I can’t see you naked” and starts with a story about me being on an airplane trying not to get into trouble with the person sitting next to me.
( If we find typos in the posted chapters (I’ve found a few already), do you want to know about them? Or are they from an earlier pre-publication version? )
-mpg
Thanks Mpg – this sample version was from a pre-copyedit prerelease, so none of them are in the book.
I’m checking with O’Reilly to get the sample chapters updated, and I’ll follow up here.
I’m about halfway through the book…Gave my niece a copy for Christmas. (She’s in college and hates having to give presentations.) And I know why speakers use boring titles.
If the title of a presentation is sexy, clever or funny, it implies that your talk will be sexy, clever or funny. Rather than having to try to live up to the preview – we all know how disappointed we are when the movie preview shows ALL of the good scenes and the rest of the movie is a bust – speakers use a boring title, hoping that the audience will then be pleasantly surprised when their talk is sexy, clever or funny. If the audience doesn’t…Well, what did you expect with a title like Boring 101?
good stuff, fun and most useful, and I took the hint and blogged it:
http://www.idealware.org/blog/2010/02/scott-berkun-on-public-speaking.html