Magic as a full time job part one

I was talking with a magician friend of mine the other day and we were discussing what it takes to put on a show and how much of it is never seen. I thought I would take a minute and let you in on what is never seen on stage. During the week if we do not have any shows we work in the office booking shows, finalizing contracts, contacting new clients, returning phone calls / emails, and working on new marketing campaigns. Natalie is in her office upstairs and I am in my office downstairs. She does all of the contracts and the taking of the deposits and I focus on getting new contacts ready to book and I work on the marketing. After work I feed the show animals which are in an outside building; as of now we have 7 doves, 14 ducks and 17 bunnies. Then we work out. After my work out is when I like to research magic and/or practice. Natalie will start dinner or read for a couple of hours, then we eat and watch some TV or a movie, then head to bed. That is a typical day in the office. What people do not realize is that shows do not just appear out of nowhere, you have to market yourself and you can not wait for the phone to ring, if you are doing that you will surely starve. I have been in business since 1996 and each year we are growing by leaps and bounds, but none of this would happen if we just sat on our hands. I have magicians ask me what my secret to success is all the time and the truth is that we treat each and every show like it is a high dollar gig. Each show is appreciated and we do our best to make each and every show memorable for the client.
We will continue this story next month and we will discuss what goes into getting ready for each and every show.
Stay tuned for part 2...

Free Magic Tricks

Magic is universal, it crosses all language barriers. Magic is as popular today as ever. People are interested in magic and do want to learn, but in this era of immediate gratification the internet and information out there is a total mess. The masked magician show aired in 1997 on fox. His pitch was that he was going to reveal magic secrets, he will also provide scantly clad assistants to dance around. He did reveal some secrets in magic and he even made up some of his own secrets to reveal. My favorite is when he levitated his assistant with a fork lift and the voice over guy said this is the only way it can be done. I personally know about 15 different levitations and none of those methods use a fork lift. Youtube nowadays is also another land mine of people not knowing magic trying to reveal secrets. There is 1000 or more masked magicians on youtube giving false information without the dancing girls or production value. It is the same today as it was in 1997; if the person is such a great magician they would be performing magic and not revealing secrets. Plus knowing the secret is such a small part of the over all performance. It is just like I tell my magic students, "knowing how to make a guitar make sound does not mean you can play the guitar."