Getting Ready to Present

I’m excited to deliver my Zine Your Scene workshop for the Get Inked 2025 participants! This session is going to be a blast. My daughter even signed up— which, I’ll admit, makes me a little nervous. I tend to prefer presenting to audiences I don’t know. That said, presenting to a familiar crowd can be fun in its own way, too.

Speaking of presenting to familiar crowds, I recently watched a webinar by an author on a topic I was eager to learn about. I’ve attended their workshops before, and—well, let’s just say it was a frustrating experience. They were prepared but veered off script, skipped key slides, and committed a litany of presentation sins. My corporate trainer friends and I say, trainers make the worst participants—because we know exactly how powerful a well-structured presentation can be.

So, in the spirit of better presentations, here are a few golden rules:

• Tell me your points rather than continually telling me you don't have enough time to make your point. Use that time to make the point! That's why I'm taking time out of my schedule to see you. This author had a lot to say. I wanted to hear and learn from them. The 45-minute format was short, sure, but instead of reminding us how little time they had, they could have delivered their content.

• Know what to present, know what to hand out. Present the objectives. The session turned into a sales pitch—backlist books, upcoming releases—while the actual content I came for got sidelined. That sales pitch? It would have worked great as a QR code on the final slide. Or better yet, a link on every slide, so attendees could check it out after the session—without being taken on a detour.

As I go through my files, I’m finding a ton of workshop material that might help authors and illustrators sharpen their presentation skills. Stay tuned for future posts!