When I found out a few years ago that designing PowerPoint presentations could be a career, I immediately went into consume-everything-I-can-find-on-this-topic mode as I am wont to do when something strikes my fancy (hello Beatles, Pixar, Star Trek…and LOTS of other things). I still haven’t recovered from this obsession yet, but recently I’ve become aware of more fuel for the fire. Below are some of the up-coming books on presenting and slide design that I’m WAY excited about: Three from authors with an established track record and one from a promising first-timer. I can’t recommend them since I haven’t read them yet, but I’m such a fan of all of these authors previous works that I’d order them sight unseen. One thing’s for sure: presentation design fans will be at no loss for input in the coming months.

The Naked Presenter – Garr Reynolds

Garr just released his follow-up to Presentation Zen, Presentation Zen Design, so I was shocked to see this as I poked around Amazon today, but Garr’s already working on book number 3, apparently. Garr has mentioned the idea of “naked communication” on his blog before, but I had no idea that he’d be developing the idea into a full book and the description on the Amazon pre-order page has me very excited. It wasn’t long after I started looking into presentation design that I realized how much of creating a great presentation wasn’t laying out the slides themselves, but organizing and planning the entire presentation. I’m excited to hear Garr’s thoughts on how to apply his signature Zen aesthetic to presenting in general.

UPDATE: Garr just mentioned that he’s writing the new book today on his Posterous site. Head on over there to read the post, as well as my thoughts about “naked” presenting in the comments section.

The Presentation Zen Way – Garr Reynolds

If Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design are the required slide design text books, then The Presentation Zen Way is the accompanying lab fee. Shaped like a Japanese bento box (from which Reynolds drew inspiration in his first book), this contains everything you need (short of a laptop running slideware) to start creating killer presentations. Included are a 50 minute video in which Garr explains many of his slide design techniques, a notepad for story-boarding your slides, two packs of post-it notes, two pencils, and a coupon worth $300 from iStockPhoto. The DVD is the most exciting part of the set, but as a slide designer, you’re gonna be purchasing all of those other things anyway, so why not get them all together in one package? Pretty cool.

Resonate: Present Stories That Transform Audiences – Nancy Duarte

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, as Nancy and crew have been talking it up on the Duarte Blog for several months now. But today I noticed the detailed book description for the first time, which reveals a little about how the book will be organized. The thing I’m most excited about is the allusion to the audience as hero and the presenter as mentor. What an amazing metaphor for that relationship. Given the way the Slide:ology fundamentally changed the way we see presentations and slide design, I’ve been wondering if Nancy would be able to come up with equally ground-breaking ideas for her sophomore effort, but what we’ve seen so far bodes well. The fact that it comes out a week after my birthday has to be a good sign, too.

How to Be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate! – Scott Schwertly

I’m very excited to hear that Scott has a book deal. This will be his first, but if the kind of content he produces regularly on both the Ethos 3 blog is any testament, this book will rock. Scott’s distinct tone and style is starkly different from most others on the presentation design scene and I find his tongue-in-cheek presenters tips to be both humorous and enlightening. I can’t wait to add his tome to my ever-growing presenting library.