Saturday, February 9, 2013

Researching House History Presentation

Today was my presentation at The Heights on how to research the history of a home. I arrived an hour early because I have a phobia that the electronic equipment will not work and I'll be stuck with a poor presentation. While some talks can be handled with no visual aids, this particular one would be very difficult to do without my slides. The first words out of the tech guy's mouth were that he could not find the cord to connect their projector to my laptop. Words to warm every presenter's heart. He ended up finding a different projector and we went to work connecting the two machines. I normally work with a Mac, but most facilities do not own the cord to connect a Mac to their projector, so I brought Jim's PC laptop along. We finally got the two machines to talk to each other, but the full slide would not show up on the big screen even though it was full screen on the PC. While the situation was not ideal, I could make do with it if I had to in a pinch. Fortunately someone in the audience suggested that I press Control, F7. Sure enough, that did the trick! And I was ready to go 10 minutes early.

There were only about 10 people in the audience, which was a little disappointing. As Jim pointed out, it takes as much work to prepare for an audience of 10 as an audience of 1,000. (Well, except for running all the handouts!) But those who did attend were very engaged and had a few suggestions on resources they had used in researching their homes that I had not even considered. Plus I sold 3 copies of my book, and considering that 2 of the people in the room already had it that is not too bad. I am hoping that I can do more of these presentations because I really enjoyed it.

As an update to the CreateSpace debate, both the books I processed through CS are now live and available on Amazon. Woo, hoo!

2 comments:

Dan said...

I'm sure it was a great presentation, Kim. I'd love to see it sometime. Congrats on the sales, too! And I know what you mean about tech phobias...

Mrs. Wryly said...

Woo hoo! I'm sure you will get other gigs! And sell some books!