Show vs Business (A Bit of My Story...)
Word of mouth is all you need! (Bzzzt! Wrong answer...)
Probably the worst piece of advice I received when I started performing professionally was, “Do a good show and word of mouth will keep the bookings coming.” The first half of that is valid — I had a good show (and still have a stack of testimonials as proof) but within a few years I burned out and gave up — I was barely making an existence, much less an actual living.
This was back in the day way before the internet, so no way to look up info on marketing, and I lived in Alaska, where there were not exactly a plethora of performers who I could learn from, so it was almost all trial-and-error.
Mostly error.
For example, I decided to buy an ad in the newspaper to get some leads, so I scraped up what money I could and bought a display ad. A single display ad. It was about one inch tall by four inches wide and I splurged on the cost and ran it on a Sunday.
One ad, that ran one day. I had no clue that’s not how you did display advertising.
Another time a friend of mine said I should try radio advertising. (That he was a salesman at a radio station was, I think, a coincidence.) That time I found enough money to run twenty 30-second ads over the course of a week. Of course, I was still basically broke, so I had to run them in the overnight shift, after midnight.
That worked as well as the newspaper advertising. *crickets*
I didn’t know anything about marketing and so I couldn’t seem to get over that hump where there were enough shows coming in to be able to raise my prices, be choosy about which gigs I would take, and just get to that next level.
Part of the lack of shows was due to living in Alaska in the 1980s. There was just one city (Anchorage) and some small towns, and most of those very far away from each other. Alaska (still) is not a great place to try and make a living as a full-time entertainer. Especially if you’re starting off very poor, as I was. I came from a dirt poor family, seriously.
I had the show part down — but didn’t have a clue about the business part. I wish someone had impressed upon me the importance of the second part of the phrase show business. Don’t do one without the other.
Full-Time Pro vs Part-Time Pro
At the time I was trying to make a full-time living as a performer — I didn’t have any other job experience at that point. I dropped out of school after the 8th grade to perform (I got my GED when I turned 16) and did that until I was about 21 or 22. When I decided that I couldn’t keep doing something that wasn’t working, I got a job and basically dropped almost all performing.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as a part-time pro — someone who would get paid for doing magic, but wasn’t doing it full-time; it wasn’t what paid the bills. How could I not know that? I blame it on my brain not being fully developed until about age 26. Mostly I blame it on living in Alaska which was too freaking far from actual civilization and people who I could have seen that were doing a job *and* performing.
So I gave someone my doves and packed away all my props. Over the next decade I whittled that stuff down, from move to move, until I had just a box of books and a box of props. Those two boxes followed me for the next few decades until 2017 when I decided I missed magic and unpacked them.
So How Do You Make It As A Full-Time Pro?
I dunno, I wasn’t able to do it.
Looking back I see a lot of things I did wrong, but I don’t see very many specific things I would have been able to do that would have made a big difference. Knowing what I know now I would have had a much better shot at “making it.” Unfortunately, that’s kind of the motto of life — you only get to know what’s behind, not what’s ahead.
But I’m hoping that soon I can tell you how to make it as a part-time pro, because that’s what I’m focusing on now. I have a 40-hour per week job that pays the bills and gives me decent health benefits. And I live in a city of 250K people (many affluent) that’s part of a metro area of about 5 million people. And there are professional magicians here. Both full-time and part-time. And many of them are very open about the marketing things they do that work, and the things that don’t.
Because I have a job I don’t have to make a living with my shows.
Because I have mentors I don’t have to hit every pothole going down the marketing road because they have been down that road before and will steer me around them.
And because I have more people within a 30-minute drive than I could ever perform (live) for in a dozen lifetimes I don’t have to worry about lack of opportunities.
That doesn’t mean I’ll be successful as a part-time pro — but it sure increases my chances! ;)
(And, with newspapers and radio all but dead, I should be safe from being suckered into those again!)