Looking Fo A Change Of Career. Here Duncan Explains How You Can Become A Successful Magician
How to become a full time magician. Often when I attend weddings, private parties or corporate events as a professional magician, I get asked how to become a full-time magician, or how long have I been a full-time magician? I also get asked by a lot of younger magicians how they can break into the world of performing professionally. So, I thought I’d give some thoughts and ideas on how you can do just that. There are three questions you need to start with.
Start With Why?
The first question you need to ask yourself is why? Why do you want to become a magician? If you want to become a magician because you like the idea of having a flexible job or you just love entertaining people, or you want to have an alternative way to earn some extra money for your family, or you want to be a full-time magician and earn a full-time wage, and these are different reasons to become a full-time or part-time magician. They’ll also help guide you as the amount of time and effort you need to building your business.
If you only want to become a part-time magician, there may be less effort is needed because you already have a full-time income. If you are looking to support your family, your children, then you need to consider all aspects of the business as well as the performance. If you want to become a full-time magician, you need to take full acceptance that you are in show business.
And whilst for many magicians, the show part is the fun part. It’s the business part to get the show gigs which requires the most work and is the most time consuming.
So, we need to start with why? Most people can articulate what they do and the style of magic. Most people can articulate how they do it, but very few magicians and indeed businesses can articulate why? They do what they do. If you understand this—this gives you a direction of which to build your business. The next two questions also start with ‘W’.
If You Want to know how to become a full time magician you need to ask to questions, prefaced with Who and What:
Who do you want to serve and what entertainment challenge are you looking to solve? So, who do you serve? Do you serve the people who work in pubs and clubs? Do you serve a wedding audience? Do you serve the corporate audience?
Do you serve trade show audience?
And what kind of entertainment void or problem do you look to solve?
Maybe it’s to fill a gap between the wedding breakfast and the evening entertainment. Maybe it’s to perform over a drink’s reception or a corporate event.
Maybe you are merely a full-time magician who performs at pubs and clubs to keep clients entertains. Or you may be the kind of magician who performs at trade shows to convert sales leads. Maybe you are one of all.
But when you are starting out as a magician, it’s important to choose your lane and decide who you serve, and then consider how you are going to promote yourself to serve them accordingly.
So, after we’ve made these considerations, the next—we need to start with the magic itself. There’s no point becoming a full-time magician if you don’t know how to do magic. So, this magic for some comes from a being inspired by watching David Blaine on TV or seeing another magician at a party, or maybe watching some TV shows with magic on, or maybe your grandfather or father also used to be a full-time magician. Whatever it is, you need to start learning some magic. You could start with some core books, “The Encyclopedia of Magic”, if you want to learn Card Magic, “Corinda 13 Step to Mentalism or JB Bobo’s Book of Coin Magic.” These are foundation books and will help shape your style of magic and give you a passion for a certain genre.
Watch Duncan's Close Up Magician Magic Showreel Below:
After You Can Identified Your What Who and Why? What Next?
From there, you may find interest in buying some packet tricks or self-working tricks that you can amaze your friends. You can find these from Penguin Magic, Alakazam if you’re in the UK, vanishing ink or illusionist. These could be phone tricks, card tricks, coin tricks, mind reading tricks, but whatever they are, try and choose a style which sits with you and try and choose some magic which really wows audiences. When learning magic, it’s important to get good feedback.
You need to choose people who can feed back to you properly, and I don’t mean feedback from your mom or your dad who may very well say that was great son or great daughter because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. You want to get feedback ideally from a professional and better yet from someone independent. So, that you know what’s good and bad. Whilst we might think it’s good, we need to get the opinion of somebody else to see the magic from a different vantage point. Picking up a deck of cards and performing a card trick or a coin trick can be easy as that. Certainly, in the world of self-work tricks.
However, the passion for most magicians is practicing a sleight of hand or sleight of mind if you do mentalism to perform something truly wonderous. So, the next part of being a professional magician, much the same as becoming a professional in any profession is practice is often said that you need 10,000 hours to be a really proficient at something, 20,000 hours to be at elite status. Why is practice so important? Well, practice can make perfect or push you closer to perfect, and the closer you they are too perfect, the more people will appreciate the high quality of your magic. If they appreciate the high quality of their magic, they’ll tell their friends or invite you to their own parties.
And then this is one route to gaining gigs that you don’t have to worry about. So, don’t discount the importance of practicing not only your magic but also your presentation.
Often, we are booked as not only magicians, but entertainers. Just performing card tricks or coin tricks is only one part of entertaining guests. Can you hold a conversation? Are you friendly? Think about all of the other things to make your magic entertaining and funny.
Watch Duncan Performing His Incredible After Dinner Shown Below:
Find Yourself A Mentor
The next step is to consider finding yourself a mentor. A professional magician who’s worked in the industry for a long time can be hugely beneficial to help guide you as to what works well, what doesn’t work well. Where to find gigs, the kind of rates that you charge and what you need to do to make your business successful. Choose a mentor who’s prepared to give you the time, but also a mentor who’s actually working full-time and professionally. Unfortunately, in the world of magic, there’s a lot of snakes or jam’s people who selling courses or giving advice who have no experience performing in the real world. Often, they produce magic tricks as well, which don’t work in the real world just on camera.
To really make it as a professional magician, you need to consider all aspects of your style, your performance style, the quality of your magic, but also as much as your own personal appearance. This could be the clothes that you are wearing, the style of hair cut you have, and your overall image. Consider who are you and what kind of performer are you? Are you a comedian or are you a trade show magician? But we’ll get into that in a bit. So, where can you find a mentor? Well, in the world of any business, it’s no longer organizations versus organizations. It’s networks versus networks, and we’re now only as good as our networks. So, really nurture your network. You can find your network from magic guilds in your local area where a group of amateur magicians may come together and discuss magic and share ideas, or you can apply to join the magic circle.
The magic circle is of course, a paid members club, which also accepts amateur magicians, and the quality is not always high. Sure, you may have to take an entrance exam. Some may have taken an entrance exam 50 years ago and the quality may not have been high. So, be careful. But it’s a great way to understand the business, learn magic, and network with fellow magicians in a somewhat lonely artful. It may also be worth considering spending some time and some money to attend a convention. Every year in the middle of February, the biggest magic convention in the world is held in Blackpool, spanning 3 days here you’ll get to speak with magic dealers, magic inventors, watch lectures, watch performances, and immerse yourself in the world of magic.
What Kind Of A Magician Are You - Really....
So, after all of that, it’s important to find who you are as a magician. Are you a wedding magician? Are you a trade show magician, a closeup magician, an ipad magician, a comedy magician? Do you want to be a full-time magician who runs a magic shop? Or do you want to get on a talent show and become a TV magician? Whatever you choose, decide the image of want to portray and stick to that.
So, after all of these considerations have been made, that’s when we can start looking at growing our business. So, we need to start with traditional business cards. Even if you get your first one or two gigs through friends or family, it’s important to hand out some business cards and perhaps even create some routines which involve business cards. This way, they’re left a memorable memento that they’ll tell their friends about. Then we need to consider how we’re going to get our gigs. Either people will come to you or you knock on their door, if people are going to come to you—well, we need to be proactive in our advertising.
You may consider building yourself a website, a digital footprint, which promotes your services. You may want to invest in somebody helping get increased visibility or pay for AdWords to get you at the top of Google. You may want to advertise in trade magazines or take part in wedding showcases. These are events held at wedding venues where you demonstrate your abilities amongst other vendors or suppliers in the hope that you can convert them into paying customers. Other strategies you can use to increase your profile include getting magic gigs.
Hamleys in London has a concession stand called “Marvin’s Magic.” Here, young and upcoming magicians apply their trade demonstrating some of Marvin’s Magic’s products. Sure, this is quite limited in the range of magic you can perform, but it gets you used to performing magic in front of a live real audience. And of course, you’ll get paid. You may also consider doing free gigs at rotary clubs or charity events to help increase your profile and get word of mouth referrals.
Reach Out To Event Planners
And finally, outreach. You may decide being proactive in your approach to getting gigs is the best route for you. Consider connecting with event organizers and event planners’ organizations see when their yearly Christmas party is coming up, or if they’re looking at summer events or other long service awards, and offering your services for paid or free to again, increase your profile. And finally, you may want to promote your services with an agency—globally and in the UK, there are many entertainment agencies all can help secure you gigs. But don’t forget, not only other magicians on their books, there are also a number of other apps as well. They will often take a commission and often have established relationships with magicians already.
So, there you have it. A bit of an overview on how to become a full-time magician. Once you become a full-time magician, the job doesn’t stop. In fact, it only just starts. You need to keep hustling. You need to keep moving forward. You need to be progressing not only on your own skillset and ability, but also on your business.
If you don’t work hard on your business, no one else will. It takes a right kind of person to become a full-time magician. You need to equip yourself with a business acumen and mindset to run your own business. It’s not easy and the hours are long, but the rewards are high and you can get great sense of freedom and sense of accomplishment knowing that you’re running a business, that you’ve yourself and doing a job that you truly love.
Get In Touch With Duncan To Find Out More
Duncan William is a full-time magician. He’s been a full-time magician for over 15 or 20 years. He used a similar format to start his own business and performs at parties both locally, nationally, and internationally. If you’re interested in securing a professional magician for your wedding party or private event, and do not hesitate to get in contact with Duncan using the button below, or give them a call to learn more about how he can make your event amazing.
