Speak on Cruise Ships Review
Speak on Cruise Ships (Keyes review)
AUTHOR: Daniel Hall Daniel Hall, $97 (USD); $105 (CAD) online e-book, 137 pp order here HOW to order info
If you download this book, you should know that it is a pdf file — which is 632Kb. reviewed by John T.D. Keyes
How would you like to work a single hour per day on a cruise ship, with no demands on your time during ports of call, enjoying the ship’s lavish meals and entertainment, all without paying a penny? In this downloadable e-book, Daniel Hall, an enthusiastic veteran “enrichment lecturer,” as shipboard speakers are called in the cruise business, outlines in precise detail the way in which he got started, and how you can get started, too.
Hall, a Texan who trained as a nurse then turned lawyer and then became a financial and real estate adviser (read: modern day self-employed Renaissance man), has been an onboard enrichment lecturer for the past three years. His recommendations for those who want to emulate his enviable lifestyle are summarized in Speak On Cruise Ships: Eight Easy Steps to a Lifetime of Free Cruises by Sharing Your Passions and Interests as an Onboard lecturer (Even if You’re Petrified of Public Speaking. At press time, he had taken seven free cruises and had three more scheduled for the coming year.
The book’s tone is not unlike that of an onboard recreation director trying to sleepy crowd of passengers to engage in aerobic exercise at 7:00 in the morning, but once you get past a certain level of forced narrative cutesiness, there’s no doubt that this book really does deliver what its title promises.
Hall explains how you can identify areas of interest in your own life that can be fleshed out into viable speaking topics. There’s a difference between expertise, which you may not have, and interest, which you may have and which is sufficient for the purpose of becoming an enrichment lecturer. There are three main topic areas that appeal to those in a position to hire you: destination-driven topics, arts and crafts, and general interest. Each area gets thoroughly amplified, with lots of examples, all of which sound quite do-able. The most attractive pitch is a “perfect trifecta” that has one speech topic in each category.
He goes on to explain how to approach cruise ship companies or agencies that handle booking of speakers for some of the lines; how to sell yourself during that ever-important first phone call; how to prepare for an audition speech (whereby you pay for your first cruise but get the cruise company to let you audition as a speaker for future cruises during the voyage); how to then structure your speech (this is a very lengthy and vital section of the book), how to rehearse; and then how to actually deliver it once on-board. Another section covers how to prepare an audiovisual package, which some entertainment directors would prefer you send them before they make a decision. These sections have great little nuggets, such as why Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to make that call to the cruise line.
Being an e-book, there are links to meta-search engines and online libraries (for any necessary research into your speech topics), links to cruise lines (where you can research each company and entertainment requirements), and a concluding chapter that allows you to download extensive interviews with principals at the speakers’ bureaus serving the industry. (The book is also available on CD-ROM, which comes complete with the interviews.) There are also some very basic instructions on how to do research online, and even how to cut and paste material on a computer (not that Hall is recommending plagiarism, of course).
Even if you end up deciding that cruise-ship speaking isn’t for you, there are a lot of useful tools in this book that would help anyone whose job or life circumstances call for speaking in public, or in any way selling oneself to a crowd, or combining entertainment and education in a teaching session. But the fact that Hall has made this work for him, and given how easily he breaks the whole process down, you’ll want to give it a shot. Bon voyage!
I will be conducting a complimentary teleclass on September 26 with Daniel Hall.
You are welcome to join the class. Click here to register.
