Bestselling Books On Public Speaking
If you’re a public speaker, you probably need an occasional infusion of inspiration to keep your skills sharp and your performances fresh. While you can learn a lot from blog posts and video tutorials, there is still no substitute for an in-depth book, written by an expert.
If you’re looking for an exceptional book to help you elevate your public speaking performances, peruse the list of bestsellers below and find one that can help you take your public speaking skills to the next level.
1. Speak Up!: An Illustrated Guide to Public Speaking
Summary:
An introduction to public speaking that’s smart, compelling, fun, and affordable, Speak Up offers great writing and examples, strong coverage of course topics, practical guidelines for creating effective presentations, and hundreds of custom-drawn illustrations that bring speech concepts to life.
This new edition adapts Speak Up to the emerging world of virtual meetings, vlogs, digital platforms, and e-learning with new coverage throughout that helps students develop and deliver presentations online. Speak Up takes advantage of the media by integrating speech video and assessment right into the book, modeling techniques and helping students apply their knowledge to their own speeches. Access is automatic and includes more than 200 video clips, the largest library available. Even better, students get all of this at less than half the price of competing texts.
Speak Up!: An Illustrated Guide to Public Speaking
2. Public Speaking: An Audience-Centered Approach
Summary:
Public Speaking: An Audience-Centered Approach, 9/e brings theory and practice together. Its distinctive and popular approach emphasizes the importance of analyzing and considering the audience at every point in the speech-making process. This model of public speaking is the foundation of the text, and it guides students through the step-by-step process of public speaking, focusing their attention on the dynamics of diverse audiences, and narrowing the gap between the classroom and the real world.
Public Speaking: An Audience-Centered Approach (9th Edition)
3. Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life
Summary:
In Steal the Show, New York Times best-selling author Michael Port draws on his experience as an actor and as a highly successful corporate speaker and trainer to teach readers how to make the most of every presentation and interaction. He demonstrates how the methods of successful actors can help you connect with, inspire, and persuade any audience. His key strategies for commanding an audience’s attention include developing a clear focus for every performance, making sure you engage with your listeners, and finding the best role for yourself in order to convey your message with maximum impact.
Michael Port is one of the most in-demand corporate speakers working today. His presentations are always powerful, engaging, and inspirational. And yes, audiences always give him a standing ovation.
4. Practically Speaking
Summary:
Practically Speaking is a brief text that covers the essentials of public speaking without sacrificing student interest or sound scholarship. Using a conversational and edgy style, author Dan Rothwell gives practical advice and a fresh perspective on classic and contemporary theories and research. This essential guide provides students with a solid foundation in public speaking and then teaches them how to add their own voices to the conversation.
5. TED Talks Storytelling: 23 Storytelling Techniques from the Best TED Talks
Summary:
In this short but powerful guide, you’re going to learn how to use stories to make your presentations engaging and entertaining. Using case studies drawn from TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Susan Cain, Leslie Morgan Steiner, Mike Rowe and Malcom Gladwell, you’ll learn how to craft stories that keep your audience mesmerized. By the time you’ve finished reading this storytelling manifesto, you will have picked up twenty-three principles on how to create stories that keep your audiences mesmerized. Whether you are giving a TED talk or a corporate presentation, you will be able to apply the principles you pick up in this guide to make your next talk a roaring success!
TED Talks Storytelling: 23 Storytelling Techniques from the Best TED Talks
6. The Art of Public Speaking
Summary:
The Art of Public Speaking personalizes learning for every student no matter whom they are or where they are, ensuring that they come to your public speaking class confident, prepared with the principle foundations, and ready to participate in your teaching and coaching.
7. Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History
Summary:
An instant classic when it was first published a decade ago and now enriched by seventeen new speeches, Lend Me Your Ears contains more than two hundred outstanding moments of oratory. It is selected, arranged, and introduced by William Safire, who honed his skills as a presidential speechwriter. He is considered by many to be America’s most influential political columnist and most elegant explicator of our language.
Covering speeches from Demosthenes to George W. Bush, this latest edition includes the words of Cromwell to the “Rump Parliament,” Orson Welles eulogizing Darryl F. Zanuck, General George Patton exhorting his troops before D-Day, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking on Bush v. Gore. A new section incorporates speeches that were never delivered: what Kennedy was scheduled to say in Dallas; what Safire wrote for Nixon if the first moon landing met with disaster; and what Clinton originally planned to say after his grand jury testimony but swapped for a much fiercer speech.
Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (Updated and Expanded Edition)
8. How to Make Powerful Speeches
Summary:
In How to Make Powerful Speeches, you will uncover:
– What it takes to create a truly compelling speech
– How to discover and develop key messages.
– How to analyze audiences for greater impact
– How to establish your credibility with any audience.
– Why you should let your personality shine through in your speeches.
– Communicating with eye contact, hand gestures, and other body language.
– Delivering content your audience truly cares about.
– When and how to use humour in speeches.
– Essential rules for creating winning visual aids.
– Secrets to backing up and demonstrating arguments.
How to Make Powerful Speeches 2nd Edition: A Step-by-Step Guide to Inspiring and Memorable Speeches
9. Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
Summary:
When it comes to delivering a pitch, Oren Klaff has unparalleled credentials. Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a- kind method to raise more than $400 million—and now, for the fi rst time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation.
Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas.
According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn’t an art—it’s a simple science. Applying the latest findings in the field of neuroeconomics, while sharing eye-opening stories of his method in action, Klaff describes how the brain makes decisions and responds to pitches. With this information, you’ll remain in complete control of every stage of the pitch process.
Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
10. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
Summary:
Public speaking coach and bestselling author Carmine Gallo has broken down hundreds of TED talks and interviewed the most popular TED presenters, as well as the top researchers in the fields of psychology, communications, and neuroscience to reveal the nine secrets of all successful TED presentations. Gallo’s step-by-step method makes it possible for anyone to deliver a presentation that is engaging, persuasive, and memorable.
Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
11. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
Summary:
Best-selling author and popular speaker Garr Reynolds is back in this newly revised edition of his classic, best-selling book, Presentation Zen, in which he showed readers there is a better way to reach the audience through simplicity and storytelling, and gave them the tools to confidently design and deliver successful presentations.
In this new edition, Garr gives his readers new, fresh examples to draw inspiration from, with a whole new chapter for those who present on more technical and educational topics based on techniques used by many presenters who give high-level talks at TED and other powerhouse events. Whether the reader is in research, technology, business, or education–this book will show them how to take what could look like a really dry presentation and reinvigorate the material in totally fresh (and sometimes interactive!) ways that will make it memorable and resonate with the audience.
Staying true to the mission of the first), Garr combines solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity to help readers along the path to simpler, more effective presentations that will be appreciated, remembered, and best of all, acted upon.
12. Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams
Summary:
Get Backed isn’t just about startup fundraising. It’s a handbook for anyone who has an idea and needs to build relationships to get it off the ground.
Over the last 3 years, entrepreneurs Evan Loomis and Evan Baehr have raised $45 million for their own ventures, including the second largest round on the fundraising platform AngelList. In Get Backed, they show you exactly what they and dozens of others did to raise money—even the mistakes they made—while sharing the secrets of the world’s best storytellers, fundraisers, and startup accelerators. They’ll also teach you how to use “the friendship loop”, a step-by-step process that can be used to initiate and build relationships with anyone, from investors to potential cofounders. And, most of all, they’ll help you create a pitch deck, building on the real-life examples of 15 ventures that have raised over $150 million
Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams
13. HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations
Summary:
Terrified of speaking in front of a group? Or simply looking to polish your skills? No matter where you are on the spectrum, this guide will give you the confidence and the tools you need to get results.
Written by presentation expert Nancy Duarte, the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations will help you:
– Win over tough crowds
– Organize a coherent narrative
– Create powerful messages and visuals
– Connect with and engage your audience
– Show people why your ideas matter to them
– Strike the right tone, in any situation
HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (HBR Guide Series) (Harvard Business Review Guides)
14. TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
Summary:
Since taking over TED in the early 2000s, Chris Anderson has shown how carefully crafted short talks can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.
This book explains how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and equips you to give it your best shot. There is no set formula; no two talks should be the same. The goal is for you to give the talk that only you can give. But don’t be intimidated. You may find it more natural than you think.
Chris Anderson has worked behind the scenes with all the TED speakers who have inspired us the most, and here he shares insights from such favorites as Sir Ken Robinson, Amy Cuddy, Bill Gates, Elizabeth Gilbert, Salman Khan, Dan Gilbert, Mary Roach, Matt Ridley, and dozens more — everything from how to craft your talk’s content to how you can be most effective on stage. This is the 21st-century’s new manual for truly effective communication and it is a must-read for anyone who is ready to create impact with their ideas.
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
Additional Resources:
9 Books To Help You Improve Your Presentations
15 Blogs and Resources For Creative Business Leaders
Communication At Work: 13 Books To Help You To Excel at Communication
17 Must-Read Business Books Coming Soon in 2016
