Pro tip: turn your talks into photo books

First, a short personal backstory. Vicki’s and my extended families both live mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas, so they only get to see our son, London, at the holidays or at infrequent mid-year visits. Starting when London was five, every year I’ve made a photo book of his adventures through the year to give as Christmas presents to all of our relatives. These have also become cherished mementos for the three of us here in Cali. The service I use is Shutterfly, and they have yet to mis-print a book or screw up an order over the space of a decade. So I feel confident recommending them.

About 3-4 times a year I get an offer from Shutterfly for a free 8×8 hardcover photo book, usually like 20 to 26 pages unless I want to pay a little extra. Sometimes if I’ve just taken a vacation or have some other batch of good photos, I’ll burn the free photo book capturing that, but most of time I use the freebies to memorialize my talks. Here are two I had to hand in my office when I got the idea for this post. On the left is my 2014 SVPCA talk on supramedullary airways in birds and dinos, and on the right is Jessie Atterholt’s talk from last year’s SVPCA on the same topic (with loads more data).

The 2014 talk was the first one I turned into a book, and I put it together right after the conference when the logic and cadence of the talk was still in my mind. My talks tend to be very text-light, and the slides basically act as memory triggers for me to riff on at the podium. So for that book I deliberately tried to capture the essence of what I said about each slide, hoping that it would make it easier to write the paper when the time came (and the time is, er, now, since Jessie has written the first draft already).

I also tend to use a lot of slides compared to most other folks, so I doubled up the slides on each page to fit the talk into the confines of a free book. For the recent Haplocanthosaurus presentation at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress (available here), I put a lot of text on the slides to make them self-explanatory, and used fewer slides. So when I made that talk into a book, I just made each slide a full page, with no captions.

You know who appreciates these things? Anyone who wants to hear about your work, but doesn’t want to sit through a 15-minute slide presentation. It’s so much more natural and inviting to hand someone a book and say, “Here’s my talk, feel free to look through it or borrow it for a few days”. It’s like taking some 8×11 printouts of your poster to a conference: making born-digital presentations into physical artifacts may feel old-fashioned, but those artifacts are amazingly useful when you’re talking with other primates in meatspace.

You know who else appreciates these things? Coauthors who couldn’t be at the conference. So occasionally if I have a free book to burn, I’ll make an extra copy of one I already have incarnate, and send it to a coauthor as a gift.

So I recommend doing this. I don’t know how much stuff you have to order from Shutterfly to get free book offers now and then (maybe not very much since they do make some back on shipping), but I know how much your first book will cost if you’re not a Shutterfly user: nothing. The first five new users who use the link below will get a free 8×8 photo book. I’ll get one, too, for bringing people on board, but it’s not a cult, you can leave anytime. I wouldn’t, though, this stuff is too useful.

Here’s that link: https://invite-shutterfly.com/x/DvuNbO