Josh Bernoff (@jbernoff) has a great post on one of the Forrester blogs about securing a speaker for a conference or other event.

Consider these points when approaching a potential speaker:

1. Great to meet you. Let me introduce you to the people who help me with speeches.
2. Yes I charge. Yes I charge for speeches and I also do them, unpaid, for exposure. But we make those decisions.
3. I’d be delighted to talk to you about your audience ahead of time.
4. No, you don’t own the content of my speech.
5. Don’t assume you can record and post it, either.
6. I’d sort of like to keep the slides in my own format.
7. And the early slide review is a bit of a time-sink.
8. You want books? Let’s figure that out ahead of time.
9. Other than that, just tell me where and when to be and we’re set . . . for that time slot.

Since most of my talks are public (usually at conferences) I rarely think about point #5.

However, I couldn’t agree more with point #6. Reformatting my presentations to fit the conference producers (usually poorly designed) template is a big PITA and usually makes the slides look terrible.

You can get the gist of Josh’s key points from the list above but if you’re considering a speaker for your conference, be sure to read his post in it’s entirety.

[Josh Bernoff: How to hire anybody (including me) to give a speech]