Giving a talk, presenting a slide deck, teaching a class, delivering a keynote, conducting an interview, and other performances often provoke uncomfortable anxiety. Whether it’s a low-key motivator of a stronger performance or produces a more debilitating flight-or-flight response depends less on the presenter’s personality and more on perception and preparation.
Although glossophobia (literally/delightfully, tongue (glosso) fear (phobia)), or speech anxiety, can manifest in uncomfortable ways, anxious performers can rejoice. Why? Because anxiety is mitigated by preparation, and preparation influences perception: When performers perceive themselves as well-prepared, they perform better.
We’ve discussed tools for presentation preparation, but there are also important tools for developing softer, interpersonal skills. For example, learning the efficacy of an artful pause can differentiate a compelling talk, presentation, lecture, speech, or interview from a “meh” one.
Periodically pausing in the midst of a performance opens up space for your audience to respond or ask questions or reflect, and it conveys your comfort with your material, even if the comfort isn’t real. Pausing helps to promote listening and depends on the ability to conclude, whether a thought, a main point, a response, a slide, or a speech.
Listening and concluding can be hard to master in a performance setting, partly because talking too much and too fast is a contextual symptom of anxiety. However, it’s so important to show your audience that you’re comfortable inviting their scrutiny (and can withstand it) that preparation is worthwhile. Help yourself by using a word-to-time converter.
The tool’s purpose is straightforward: Input your word count and your talking speed, and converts it to time. Its import is clear for presentations, but the tool can help build response and reflection into any performance.
Presentations and other performances put you on display, suggesting a one-way delivery of information. But excellent and impactful presenters know that the best presentations are a shared experience by which both audience and presenter learn something. If anxiety inhibits your ability to deliver a best-level presentation, tools like words-to-time can help.
Two Become One
Oh, look at those young women up there! It’s hard to believe how much has changed since Jessica Knight and I began Modern Writing Services: Houses bought and sold; babies born and grown; and, of course, business growth and change.
This year marks the first full year without Jess. In 2019, she transitioned from her role at Modern Writing Services to that of a full-time research writer and analyst at United Health Group. While she still consults at MWS, she does so in a bespoke capacity. Here, she talks about her move:
Q: What precipitated your decision?
A: There’s not really one why, though going in-house is something I’ve thought about for a while. I was interested to see what it would feel like to have a longer-term stake in my work than I was able to have as a consultant. It can be tough to pour your heart and soul into a project and then have very little control over what happens to it after you turn it over to a client! I was also ready to step back from the business-ownership side of…well, owning a business. And I knew Molly would continue to do great things with MWS. Plus, it gave me an excuse to buy a bunch of new clothes!
Q: What’s your new position like?
A: It’s really challenging, and really interesting. It’s been a huge learning curve, and I imagine that’s going to continue pretty much as long as I stay in this job, since developments happen so quickly in the healthcare and R&D worlds. My role involves very diverse work, from conducting literature reviews and writing white papers for our business and scientific leadership; to working with our data scientists, statisticians, and clinicians to help them develop research questions, analyze results, and create narratives of their research; to collaborating with our subject matter experts to refine conference presentations and papers for publication.
Q: How is it different from, or similar to, your MWS work?
A: It’s a ginormous company, which has benefits and drawbacks. To some degree, the R&D group feels like its own little island with an independent culture, but even within R&D I have a couple hundred coworkers. And the work I do is very collaborative across research teams and roles, so the day-to-day feels a lot different from what my day-to-day was like at MWS, when my projects were almost completely solo ventures.
However, the job draws on a surprisingly similar skill set to a lot of the work I did at MWS. While it’s obviously all healthcare focused, the research, writing, and editing that I do isn’t so different from the kinds of work that I did for nonprofits, universities, and presses with MWS.
Q: The best part?
A: The energy and intelligence of my coworkers—it’s really exciting to work with such smart people and to be tasked with trying to solve such challenging problems. I’m constantly learning—and I love that constant learning is a foundational part of my job. And the food. We have weirdly good food at our office!
Q: The worst part?
A: Hands down it’s the commute. I’ve gone from rolling out of bed and into my home office, to slogging through a 30–60 minute drive each way. I can work from home, but it’s often just easier to be in the office. I listen to a lot of books on tape, which, thank god for books on tape, or I’d be a totally rageful driver. I do my best to be zen about it, but it’s for sure a drag to spend so much time in the car.
Q: When will you work with Molly again?
A: In my head, I still work with Molly. We collaborated on everything we did for six years at MWS, so I think there will always be a little piece of my brain that operates on a WWMD (what would Molly do?) basis. And I jump on any chance to actually work together again–I’m always available to come on board for special MWS projects
Bookshop Is in Beta!
Everyone’s talking about bookshop. Errr, now that everyone is almost done talking about American Dirt, the limits of representation, the perils of mis-marketing, and the lost opportunities of seven-figure advances, everyone is talking about Bookshop.
What’s Bookshop?
It’s the Amazon alternative founded by Andy Hunter (of Electric Literature, LitHub, and Catapult fame) to sustain and foster independent bookstores and their dedicated reader communities.
The Bookshop model offers readers Amazon-like convenience, but it disburses proceeds to independent booksellers and gives a 10-percent share of book sales to affiliate linkers—whether they’re independent bookstores, magazines, bloggers, or other members of the book-loving public.
Of course, Amazon is cheaper. It’s cheaper because it only offers affiliate linkers a 4.5-percent share of book sales and because, compared to Bookshop’s on-average 8-percent discount, Amazon book discounts are much, much deeper. In fact, its unsustainable discounts are a major reason Amazon drives competitors like local and independent bookstores out of business.
So, in this as in so many other cases, “cheaper” comes at a price. Committed to books? To weird and wonderful bookstores? Help them (and readers!) thrive by buying from and linking to Bookshop. Its transparent effort to support local independent bookstores may be a more expensive alternative, but anyone interested in and committed to fostering a lively and long-lived cultural conversation will benefit from its marketplace.
Book-Related Resolutions: Just as Hard to Keep as the Others
As has been documented (here and…everywhere else), I welcome the opportunity forced by the new year to reflect on the old, contemplate the present, and imagine a better, slightly more accomplished future.
But reflecting on the old means reflecting on very many resolutions I’ve failed to uphold. So, when I make resolutions, I make one or two, in areas of life I actually want to spend time in, and small enough so I have a chance of fulfillment.
In this respect, the #2020bookchallenge is a hazard and an opportunity.
My 2020 book challenge is much less ambitious: I want continue tracking the books I read (a prior, miraculously successfully met resolution) and also track why I read the book in the first place.
The Newsletter Age has resulted in many excellent book recommendations, but they are hard to track. When I finish a book, whether I loved or hated it, I want to (mentally, at least) discuss it with its recommender. Yet, by the time I receive and then read the book, its provenance has vaporized with the mists of memory.
The Library Extension tool and my trusty Excel spreadsheet are going to help me keep this resolution. The former (for Chrome or Firefox) will find the book at my local library the moment it’s recommended, and Excel will track its provenance.
It’s too late for Trust Exercise–I reserved it in 2019 but no longer remember who recommended it–but I trust I’ll be able to engage in many more mental dialogues in 2020.
Make a Record: An Argument for Transcription
Although transcription is frequently viewed as a tool for reporters and journalists, thinkers, writers, and professionals of all kinds can benefit from integrating transcription methods into their production practices.
For thinkers, writers, and professionals, a transcription habit creates an accurate record of conversations, interviews, presentations, and (perhaps) podcast-inspired soliloquies. The resulting archive stabilizes moments otherwise lost to time, making them available for regenerative reflection and exploration.
This is important for thinkers and writers, who frequently require inspiration for pitching or developing projects. But it’s also helpful for communications professionals, who benefit from casting a wide net when building and refining best practices.
While transcription once mandated an at-least doubled time investment (first, to listen to the interview or the presentation; then, to listen again and write it down; then, to listen again, to figure out what was missed the first and second times), there are now a variety of time-saving automated services.
The Open Notebook recently reported on the new automated transcription services, like Otter, Trint, Temi, and Sonix, favored by science journalists.
The automated services offer benefits, particularly in terms of price and turnaround time, and I like the Trint app’s seamless interface for nonspecialized projects. However, I use Rev when I require professional transcription services (typically when writing white papers with subject matter-expert interviews). Automated transcription is faster and cheaper than Rev’s $1/minute, 12-hour (max) turnaround, but Rev often catches the specialized language usage missed by automated services.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that the time spent transcribing the old-fashioned, incredibly time-consuming way is not time wasted. Listening to and writing down recordings is a meditative practice: It focuses the mind, but it also frees it to discover moments and insights unobserved in real-time.
The Best Book Covers
You may not be in the market for a book cover, but we’re all—surely—in the market for inspiration. You’ll find it at the Book Cover Archive, “for the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design.”
There, you might marvel at how delightfully disparate design can be:
Or, browse its links to consider the drawbacks—but also the benefits—of relying on Getty Images
There’s value in a cover that places a book in conversation with its genre: When you pick up a book with “Man in the Fog,” you know just the sort of noir you’re going to get.
But of course, there’s value in arresting design, too.
The cover to Forgetting Things doesn’t reveal its origins in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. But its cover certainly suggests something a bit forbidding, a bit primitive, a bit universal, and a bit fanciful, too.
Ultimately, the best book covers draw a map of a world that readers want to explore.
The Best Book Cover: Find Inspiration
This post it not a how-to. No primer, no matter how comprehensive, can teach the know-it-when-you-see-it quality that catapults an everyday shelf-piece into the realm of book art.
The Peter Mendelsund-designed Ulysses (as well as Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), provides a startlingly effective illustration. Here is style and savvy in spades. But here, too, is the kind of entrainment between writer, reader, and designer that channels a book’s essence.
In The Wave and the Mind, Ursula Le Guin describes entrainment as the tendency for two wall-mounted clock pendulums to slowly swing in sync. Physicists call this “mutual phase-locking”; Le Guin describes it as the “beautiful economical laziness” by which successful relationships are formed.
It’s all a little spectral, but this (2013) Ulysses cover illustrates the certain quiescence by which a design imparts the spirit of a story. What looks like boldly scribbled marginalia interrupts but also completes the title with the “yes” acknowledging the book’s last—and now first—word and its (arguably) most famous line: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
While this isn’t a how-to, it does offer an injunction: When approaching book cover design, find inspiration in books that illustrate style, savvy, and this kind of economical soul. Then, aim that high.
The Best Book Cover
Back when my readerly tastes were driven by the limited options at my suburb’s small, strip mall-located library, I rarely chose my books by their covers. Most of the library books sported dogeared, aggressively stickered covers anyway, so my appreciation for a cover’s import remained stunted.
It wasn’t until I arrived at college and received a syllabus that included Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea that a book cover swept me up in a passionate embrace. I had read Wide Sargasso Sea before (an excellent companion to Jane Eyre), but my copy was library-bound and looked like this:
The copy I purchased at the university bookstore looked…different:
The newer cover doesn’t say “post-colonial prequel” so much as “hot, sexy movie tie-ins!” And it certainly captured my attention. How did my first reading miss all that under-the-waterfall lovemaking?
While the wet, white-hot muscly embrace bears a mostly fantasy-based relationship to the book, the cover makes a potent play for reader’s eyeballs. This is the point of all book covers…although some achieve their aims more thoughtfully and cleverly than others.
But what makes for a thoughtful, clever book cover? One that captures readers with style that is inspired by and germane to the story between the covers? There’s a lot to consider—we’ll cover some of it in a coming post.
Soft Strategy: Setting a Completion Date
While most people benefit from plans, it’s often the preparation begotten by planning that matters more than the plan itself. This truism is attributed to Eisenhower, but its commonsense application pre- and postdates his mid-century usage.
First-time nonfiction authors, whether they walk the traditional or self-publication path, benefit from planning when they develop a completion* strategy in the earliest stages of drafting.
In most cases, this strategy begins by simply determining a completion date. The date is strategic not only because it encourages an author to set a realistic time frame in which to produce a book, but also because it invites an author to think ahead, anticipating the best-case timeline for publication and pointing to the larger continuum on which a book’s publication exists (on which completion is not completion but the beginning of the publication strategy).
Many authors are excited to set a completion date in the idea development stage. It’s only later, when faced with inexorable variables that limit progress, that authors feel the pressure of a self-imposed deadline. Of course, this is entirely as it should be. Everything feels possible before we begin—the exhilaration of possibility is the reason that some of us resist planning in the first place. It isn’t until we actually experience limitations (such as the inefficient cooperation of sources or coauthors) that we acutely feel their restrictive influence.
But pressure is often conducive to completion. And the date from which that pressure proceeds can help authors prepare for inevitable challenges, sometimes by helping to force different, more inventive, efforts at countering them.
There is another, less recognized reason for setting a completion date, too: The soft strategy authors develop for completion anticipates and readies them for that later stage of the continuum—the much harder, much more tactical strategy of publication.
*Let us stipulate that after reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, some of us will never be able to use the word “completion” without a sense of despair.
What Are Publicists and PR Reps Good For? Everything.
This is not to say that a book idea should be divided up and conquered by a team of writers (although that works, too); it’s to say that generating ideas, finding good and helpful feedback, procuring specialized editing services, designing engaging interiors and exteriors, creating solid marketing plans, and more depend on a team of specialists.
Among these specialists, a publicist or PR rep is invaluable.
For some authors, a publicist feels unnecessary: Isn’t the author the person best positioned to sell their book? Aren’t they most capable of speaking (and loudly) to its merits? For other authors, a publicist feels extraneous: Why should an author pay someone else to market a book that’s already great?
But regardless of an author’s intent or a book’s brilliance, selling a book is hard work. It requires a plan for priorities and scope, a deep(ish) list of relevant contacts, and attention to small and large details over the long term.
An author can often meet many of these criterion, but they’re almost always better positioned to do so with the help of a good publicist.
A good publicist will mean different things to different authors. But in general, a good publicist has broad experience in the author’s genre. Because of that, a good publicist also has a list of contacts in relevant media industries and with outlets where their authors will benefit from coverage. A good publicist is familiar with media lead lists and is comfortable engaging in a variety of ways on social media. A good publicist works with authors to ensure authors articulate their goals, are best positioned to meet those goals, and are able to recognize—and celebrate—when those goals are met.
Publicists are an investment, and that, coupled with the sense that they aren’t really necessary for good books, means that they’re often overlooked. But smart authors know they can best sell a book the same way they wrote it: with the help of a team.
Listen Up!
Giving a talk, presenting a slide deck, teaching a class, delivering a keynote, conducting an interview, and other performances often provoke uncomfortable anxiety. Whether it’s a low-key motivator of a stronger performance or produces a more debilitating flight-or-flight response depends less on the presenter’s personality and more on perception and preparation.
Although glossophobia (literally/delightfully, tongue (glosso) fear (phobia)), or speech anxiety, can manifest in uncomfortable ways, anxious performers can rejoice. Why? Because anxiety is mitigated by preparation, and preparation influences perception: When performers perceive themselves as well-prepared, they perform better.
We’ve discussed tools for presentation preparation, but there are also important tools for developing softer, interpersonal skills. For example, learning the efficacy of an artful pause can differentiate a compelling talk, presentation, lecture, speech, or interview from a “meh” one.
Periodically pausing in the midst of a performance opens up space for your audience to respond or ask questions or reflect, and it conveys your comfort with your material, even if the comfort isn’t real. Pausing helps to promote listening and depends on the ability to conclude, whether a thought, a main point, a response, a slide, or a speech.
Listening and concluding can be hard to master in a performance setting, partly because talking too much and too fast is a contextual symptom of anxiety. However, it’s so important to show your audience that you’re comfortable inviting their scrutiny (and can withstand it) that preparation is worthwhile. Help yourself by using a word-to-time converter.
The tool’s purpose is straightforward: Input your word count and your talking speed, and converts it to time. Its import is clear for presentations, but the tool can help build response and reflection into any performance.
Presentations and other performances put you on display, suggesting a one-way delivery of information. But excellent and impactful presenters know that the best presentations are a shared experience by which both audience and presenter learn something. If anxiety inhibits your ability to deliver a best-level presentation, tools like words-to-time can help.