Cracking the CFP Code: 7 Insider Tips
- Yoav Abrahami
- Feb 26
- 6 min read
Submitting a Call for Papers (CFP) can be a daunting task. It is the business card of your talk, used by both the conference moderators and attendees to decide if they are interested in your talk.
With this post we try to explain how a moderator is using CFP to choose talks for a conference, and how to write a CFP that catches the eye of moderators and conference attendees.
What the Moderator Does
The moderator's role includes creating one or more tracks from CFPs. For example, in one conference I have taken part as a moderator, 36 CFPs were submitted for product, front end, and mobile, but only 10 spots were available in the track. In another instance, only four spots were available for front-end topics, with just one of those specifically for React. Given four CFPs for React, the moderator must choose just one.
The moderator selection process is based on the CFP itself (reading the CFPs of all submissions), additional information provided such as examples and presentation outline. Finally, the selection process also takes into account the speaker's reputation, past presentations and videos. Yet, the CFP is the key element in the talk selection process, while all the rest are tools to support the process.
Tips for making a Good CFP
1. What to talk about
I have seen many proposals for talks which are “an introduction to that or this”, or talks like “lets learn that thing or that other thing”.
But you have to ask yourself, what are you really interested in hearing yourself in a conference? Are you really interested in a talk that you can find an equivalent tutorial online?
I believe that the best talks are about overcoming a challenge, such as something not working as expected, or taking a system to the next scale (x100 data, x100 traffic, x100 performance), or transforming a system from one legacy architecture to the next future architecture. Talks of a pain faced, and how to overcome that pain. Talks about personal experience, personal learning from that experience, sharing your story.
2. The Title
A good CFP must have a good title. A title should be short, catchy and to the point. It has to present what you are gonna talk about, to let readers decide if to even read the rest of the CFP description. The title is the first and only chance to get the committee's attention among the hundreds of other CFPs
From experience, numbers, specifically large numbers, are great to catch the attention of the reader. But only if relevant to the talk.
Positive Examples:
“Your next Game - Built by React” - This is a great title because it is clear what we are talking about - games with React, as well as creating a mystery.
“Async Awaits: Deep Dive into its Power” - The one is great as it tells what it is about, we know what to expect while using the term power creates mystery and hints at the importance of async awaits.
“Growing our product to 100m users” - Growing - talking from self experience. 100m users - a very large number and challenging...
Negative Examples:
“An Overview of Recent Developments in AI” - well, while it tells us what the talk is about, it is boring and trivial, but more important is that it is very generic and we have no idea what those recent developments are. Are these developments from last month? Last 5 years? Can I use them? Will it be a theoretical or down to earth talk?
3. First Line - Catch the readers attention
A good CFP needs to capture the reader's attention right away. The first sentence is super important and should be short, ask a question, create mystery, or otherwise catch the reader's eye.
Positive Examples:
“As product managers, our biggest fear is creating a product that nobody needs.” A first line that is Intriguing, Concise, and Personalized.
“Ever wondered what's the biological difference between a short summer crush and a life-long romance?” Pose a question in the first sentence to pique interest. The question appears unrelated to the topic of a tech talk (a tech talk), which will further intrigue the audience. It is followed by even more buildup.
Negative Examples:
“We're all using TypeScript/Babel etc, transforming our code to another code, minifying it, shipping this unreadable thing to production and using the magical powers of Source Maps so we could actually debug it and understand how it connects to what we initially wrote.” This first line of a CFP is too long, hard to read and simply does not “catch your reader's eye”
“Today we try to understand our users’ behavior mainly by BI events.” While short, it is not really clear. What is BI? Who are we? What is he talking about?
4. Keep your CFP concise, aiming for around 2-3 paragraphs
Reading hundreds of CFPs, one clear statistic I come across is that Call for Papers descriptions who have the most chances are around 2-3 paragraphs. CFPs with only one paragraph are rarely accepted, as well as CFPs of over 3 paragraphs.
Why is that? When writing a single paragraph, we have only two options - to be too short to both raise interest and explain what we aim to talk about, or to have one long paragraph that is hard to read. When writing over 3 paragraphs, the moderator who has to choose and reading over 30-40-50 CFPs will not have the full attention to read a long CFP.
From my experience, the ideal length is 2-3 short paragraphs, each of about 3-6 lines.
5. Focus on the actual content versus overhead, unimportant details, or buzzwords.
Many people believe that using sophisticated language, buzzwords, and superlatives such as "great" or "amazing" makes their writing appear more intelligent. However, this adds overhead compared to actual content which makes the understanding of the text way harder.
A good measure of content to overhead ratio is considering what happens when we mark off all the unnecessary words - while still keeping the ability to understand the original text.
Lets consider two examples, at which we marked over the buzzwords, connecting words and overheads:
A good example:
“As backend developers, we often overlook the security aspects of the applications we build. A small vulnerability in our system can lead to serious data breaches. Often, these security gaps remain unnoticed until they are exploited.
As a backend engineer at SecureTech, I have encountered security challenges and learned best practices to mitigate risks. In this talk, I will share insights into common security pitfalls and discuss strategies for backend security. Together, we’ll analyze real-world examples, identify vulnerabilities, and explore solutions to make our applications more secure.”
We have struck out 36 of 87 words, about 40% of the content, and the CFP is still readable.
A not so good example:
“We all use Docker and containers during build processes to package and deploy applications, making them easy to run anywhere. But have you ever looked into how its layers mechanism works? Each command in a Dockerfile adds a new layer on top, impacting build size, affecting container caching, and has impact on performance. In this talk, we’ll break down Docker layers, how they’re created, and how to optimize them for faster and smaller images. Join me to learn more!”
In this case we have struck out 46 of 75 words, which makes 60% of the content, while the CFP is still readable.
We all write with buzzwords, with connection words and with other overhead words (who do not add information to the paragraph). What matters is the ratio. When writing for a conference, we are not writing artistic texts or high literature. We are writing for the moderators and conference attendees, who have to read 10s of such talk descriptions.
Keep it short, keep it to the point, keep it focused. Explain plainly what you are about to talk about.
6. Use AI
Let's face it. We are Israelies. We talk Egnlize. Which is kind of like English, but not really. We do not know many key words, we do not know how to use different words properly and we do not know all the subtle meanings of some words.
But modern generative AI does.
Do not be shy of reaching out for AI to help rewrite your text in English. Just be mindful of the other 3 tips above, as generative AI loves to write long texts, full of buzz words and other useless descriptive overhead words.
7. Be Involved in the Community
Last, when a moderator is looking for a portfolio of talks for a conference, who the speakers are matters. Their experience, what other conferences they have talked at, what blogs have they written, what they have shared about and always personal acquaintances.
It is always an advantage to be involved with the local and global community, to be present at relevant meetups, to help organize events, to write blog posts and share your experience online, create videos, etc. All of those things amount to “bonus points” for the moderator when selecting a portfolio of talks for a conference.
This post was written by Yoav Abrahami
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Read more about Israel on Stage (Global Tech Conferences Matters: Welcome to Israel on Stage!) - and join our upcoming CFP sessions to write your own winning CFP:
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