The tips for today’s podcast came from a recent Time magazine article on 5 Ways to Make Small Talk When You Have Social Anxiety.

Practice in low-stakes settings.

Start by speaking at your local library, bookstore, Rotary Club, or a friend’s house (or your own).

Script some go-to phrases.

Practice telling some stories from your own experience.

Use the echo technique.

Encourage your audience to ask you questions that you can answer, drawing on your experience & knowledge.

Find an anchor.

When speaking to a crowd, focus on one or two receptive people in your audience. Talk to them.

Have an exit strategy ready.

End your talk with a great sales pitch for your book, your products, or your services—or someone’s product or service you can recommend.

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The above video was created from a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation created with the help of Microsoft Copilot. It essentially expanded on the presentation I created in the last video (based on an article by Jamie K. Wilson, The Death of Enchantment).

I was actually, for the most part, disappointed with this creation—too abstract, almost devoid of life. But I thought you should be able to compare my original video at https://bookmarketing.substack.com/p/what-hollywood-sadly-has-forgotten with the above video created by PowerPoint and Copilot but vocalized by me.

I suspect I won’t be using Copilot anymore to create videos. Not good enough by my estimate.

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Website: https://www.bookmarketingbestsellers.com

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The following is excerpted from an article by Jamie K. Wilson, The Death of Enchantment (https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/08/26/the-death-of-enchantment-why-hollywood-no-longer-holds-us-n4943034).

The spell of story is not complicated, but it is sacred:

Trust the writer.

Trust the director.

Trust the story to carry its own truth.

And most importantly: Trust the viewer.

Hollywood has forgotten that the audience is not a passive consumer but a participant. A story isn’t finished until it’s received — until the viewers buy into it, suspend their disbelief, and join the communion. But today’s studios no longer trust the viewer. They treat audiences as problems to be managed, as minds to be manipulated, as children to be lectured. …

But the cure is the same as the cause: trust restored. Allow stories to be stories again, and the spell will hold. The lights will go down, the screen will flicker to life, and once more, strangers will gasp together in the dark.

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