Posts
My recent “Deliberations” about the difficulty of making a
full time living with magic and the associated variety arts generated a few
suggestions. There were several that offered some good tips on salesmanship and
booking shows on a part time basis.
These suggestions can also be applied to full
time work. Thank you, if you wrote to me. Brian Bence (Ring
#320) offered some great advice. He is a very successful salesman of office
document systems. He stays as busy as he wants doing magic in his local
area on a part time basis:
Bryan writes:
Since I have been in outside sales for
over 12 years now and in a front line roll with customers for over 25 years… I
have learned a few things…
■You must have a great product.
■You must believe in your product.
■You must always be personable and
enthusiastic.
■You must differentiate you from the
competition.
■You must have superior follow up and
support after the sale.
■You must be ready to correct any issue
immediately.
■You must be involved in the community.
■You must always be ready to ask for a
referral!
*Notice how the word YOU is key…the
customer doesn’t HAVE to do anything. Remember the customer doesn’t buy a
product or in this case a ”show”…they buy YOU!
Ask yourself these simple questions…
■Did everyone seem to have a good time?
■Did I receive any sincere compliments
after the show?
■Did anyone ask for my card after the
show?
■Do I feel good about my performance?
■Did I take time to talk with the
organizer and others after the show?
■Did I thank my audience and those who
hired me?
How many of us follow up with a “Thank
You” card after the show? I try to consistently do this and it is a vital
part of the entire process. Again, making the customer feel special is
the key. I guarantee most or your competition is NOT doing this…just my
two cents.
I suspect that being out everyday in the office environment
gives him an opportunity to distribute his magic business cards and that helps
generate knowledge of his services.
One other professional I know works several “Kiddy’s Nights”
at restaurants as a way to get his business cards out and give previews of his
show. Nothing like getting paid to advertise!
Another letter was encouraging on the hobbyist part-time angle but very discouraging
about the full-time prospects:
Dennis,
Lot's of good advice in your last column.... but it won't make you a dime
as a full time magician..
You're very right about one thing: If a
magician is willing to work 20-50 times harder marketing than doing the show,
he may be a success --- as a professional marketer!
Let's look at music: Does Justin Bieber
spend 99 percent of his time and effort hustling up his gigs?
NO. Performing artists (singers,
bands, dancers, actors) hire agents, managers and a hundred-and-one flunkies to
do all that work for them.
So why are magicians so bent on doing
everything themselves? I'll tell you why: THEY CARE... BUT THE PUBLIC
DOESN’T GIVE A RAT’S POSTERIOR ABOUT MAGIC!
Not these days. It is a dead and dying
art. Its over! What with the Internet, theater movies, television, and
thousands of live entertainers (mostly in music) coming in annually, the TRUTH
of the matter is that everyone today is SATURATED with entertainment! The
last thing they want to do, in 2012, is go out looking for "vaudeville
novelty acts" of a bygone era, which is what magic essentially is.
I may be wrong here and there with the
details, but I think I'm in the ballpark.
Just look at the Linking Ring Magazine
every month: It looks like a "museum piece", always talking about,
and celebrating the PAST! Where are the exciting NEW ideas for 21st century,
and beyond? Is the relentless onslaught of technological marvels and
distractions making magic of the past OBSOLETE? I think it is -- in the
minds of today's audiences. Genii, Magic Magazine are all living in the past,
in a world that no longer exists or all their success stories are in other
countries.
Even musicians are having a heck of a time
making a good living these days. Just look at the people who come on
American Idol and the X-Factor: Ultimately they ALL fall by the wayside, to be
carved down to ONE winner -- who goes on to do well … for about a year or two…
and then they disappear. Never to be heard from again.
Just give it up! Sure keep a
suitcase for an occasional kiddies show if that is what you like to do. Have an
attaché case with some mentalism and walk around, but give up the idea of
making money with a stage show... It is a waste of your time and talents.
In fact, it is for most decent magicians. Apply all your marking skills to
something that will generate a cash return. Johnny Carson went on to make a
fortune on talk TV. He could still be doing Hippity-Hop Rabbits and the Die Box
in Nebraska.
You are too talented to waste your time beating the dead horse of magic!
Signed ------
Wow! I read that with mixed emotions. What is the
classic definition of “mixed emotions’? Watching your mother-in-law drive
your new Mercedes off a cliff!
Next a retired professional, who I have known for many
years, wrote:
Dennis,
When I
was pushing telephone promoted shows (before they became a thing of the past in
the 90s) , I realized I was making 10-15k for myself producing the show and
another 3k for actually doing the show and doing the show was taking up all my
time. I decided that if I were to stay in the business it would make more sense
to just pay a local decent magician a couple hundred dollars to do most of the
show. I did enough to keep it professional looking.
Magic,
as we knew it is gone. All the stuff is made in India and China and bought on-line so the
brick and mortar shops are gone. Almost all the performing venues have closed.
The general magician-illusionist is gone. If you narrowly specialize in
one area you can work. There are cruise ships and theme parks or having
your own resort theater. There is work out of the country, especially in Asia. There is a little corporate convention work still
left. You have to find a niche market.
I like
to say that we are back to the 50s. The Internet is this generation’s
“television”, the new and emerging technology. The difference is that in the
50s the economy was growing. The emerging reality is that there is little
growth in the near future for America.
That means less discretionary income for most people and fewer opportunities
for a generalized magician to find enough work.
Signed
-----
The new Internet marketing is done with meta-tags and
targeted ways to get a “Search Engine” to bring your name forward. Find any
book you can on optimizing the hits your website gets from search engines.
When someone types your city or regional area and the term
“magician” you want Google to put you on the first page. It is almost a full
time job managing it all…When you learn that skill, you can make a whole lot of
money selling your Internet services as well as magic show!
But also you need twitter, and every social media plus a
Facebook Fan Page.
Like many pro-magicians tell me: “Why do magic? You can make
far more money just selling something that most people want. One Canadian
Magician who I have known for a long time moved into being a stage
hypnotist. THAT was very big in Canada, if you know the Peter
Reveen story. Now my friend is no longer doing stage work but selling
Hypnotism as a “Stop Smoking” technique. He is doing very well! He is
doing it mostly over the Internet! The thought of watching your computer
screen and being hypnotized is eerie. He has a web-site with embedded
videos accessed through a password that you buy. Most of his techniques are
canned and managed by his server.
Most of the best magicians who love to entertain disdain
tossing around baloney. They can't compete with the hustlers who know the
marketing angles. Many got sick of designing and printing and sending out large
mailings (weeks of labor) always having to think of different ways every
Christmas season to tell people how great they are, when all they wanted to do
was SHOW them. They got sick of knowing that 99 percent of the brochures were
just put directly into the garbage.
Think about it! Musicians never have the job of
bragging about how well they can play an instrument, or sing, just to get the
work. That doesn't make a lick of sense.
That's why so many burnt-out magicians near the end of their
careers start doing the mail-order Internet magic thing, or lecturing and
writing.
The big challenge is not to end up late in life bitter,
cynical, and angry with the world -- and
yourself!
I have known far too many magician-illusionists who had
nothing else as a line of work and ended up crawling inside of a bottle and
drowning themselves in liquid destruction. Some hustled all the way to an old age
in bitter poverty.
I wonder how David Ginn, the respected super-hustler, got
through living in his area of the country without everyone there getting
sick-and-tired of his constant mailings, year after year after year. But
even he had to supplement his income by regurgitating everything he created,
and knew, to the magic world throughout his entire adult life. Ginn does
offer value in all that he does and that is one key to survival. It is obvious
that he loves what he does.
I am reminded on the long slow demise of one of the greatest
illusionists, Servais Le Roy. He first performed his now classic Asrah
levitation in London
in 1914. It is the perfect illusion and the best levitation in the history of
magic. I can be seen performing it on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
The female assistant lies on a couch and Servais covers her
with a sheet. She then rises into the air, and finally the sheet is pulled away
to reveal that she has vanished. Le Roy is also credited with developing the
Modern Cabinet, the Palanquin and the Costume Trunk illusions. These are all
classic illusions that I have built and performed.
In William Rauscher’s book about Servais Leroy, “Monarch of
Mystery”, on October 19, 1930, Le Roy was hit by a car walking across the
street in Matawan, New Jersey. He was in the hospital with
multiple injuries for nine days. He partially recovered and continued to
invent, create and occasionally perform. By 1930, vaudeville and the large
traveling illusion show was fading into history. A few niche performers
(Blackstone, Willard, Calvert, Virgil) lasted beyond Thurston and Carter’s
deaths in the mid 30s.
On June 6, 1940, at the age of 75, Leroy performed his full
evening show at the Heckscher Theatre in New
York City. LeRoy was performing for the first time in
years. His show and performing style was horribly outdated. His physical
ability was greatly diminished. Having only a single rehearsal with a new
and inexperienced crew, the show was a disaster.
Le Roy’s show and props ended up quietly rotting away in his
small garage and back yard in Keansburg,
New Jersey. In 1949 the worthless
remains of his once great show was hauled away as trash. Life ended for Servais
Leroy in 1953, not with a bang but as the end of long slow downward
less-than-magical demise.
He never realized any profit, in his lifetime, from his
creativity but his creations live on and continue to be performed.
Dennis Phillips
