CFP Acceptance!

And sometimes you’ll get accepted. Woohoo! Now you have to do the work of creating the talk!

When the conference tells you they’ve accepted your talk, make sure you nail down a couple of pieces of information, if you haven’t got those details already.

Dates. At this point, pen them into the calendar properly, you’re definitely going now.

How long they’re giving you. Slot lengths vary: an hour here, thirty minutes elsewhere, sometimes shorter still at fifteen or twenty minutes. You want to know this now, because you’re about to start writing your presentation and you need the length to know how much you can fit in.

One other thing to address here is an idea I’ve seen mentioned a couple of times online, that you should have written your talk before you got accepted. Unless you’re extremely bored with nothing else going on, I wouldn’t recommend that.

I’ve had talks I thought were really cool that nobody accepted, I spent a whole year pitching one topic and no conference wanted it. If I’d written the whole thing, I’d have been really annoyed. As it happened, I’d fleshed it out and done my research and knew what I wanted to say, but I hadn’t written the whole talk. So don’t write the whole talk up front. The point to start writing is when you get accepted.

The only exception here is something last-minute. A couple of times I’ve submitted talks that get accepted last minute, but I was using an existing talk that just needed refreshed. So in those cases you’ll want to have the talk largely complete, before submitting. Most of the time though, you’ll have some months to work on it before the day of the talk.