Increase Your Fees for Performing Magic Tricks

How to increase your fees for performing magic.

As your reputation and client base builds up over time, you will become more established as a magician, and you should already have an understanding of how much you can charge for doing magic tricks for the public. It’s very easy to fall into a pattern of only charging the same fee year after year. That’s not a smart thing to do, as it’s a price cut, because inflation eats into the value of your fee each year.

Increasing your fee is quite hard to do psychologically, as you have to face the fear of turning down work, but it pays off in the long run. Many performers start off setting a fee and remain at that level year after year. They never reach this full potential in the market, as become cheaper and cheaper over time as inflation takes its toll. As they get cheaper, their desirability for ‘premium clients’ decreases, and they end up in a cycle of low status gigs, working hard simply to treat water and pay their bills. Don’t let this happen to you!

As soon as you start filling your work diary on a regular basis, you need to think about raising the bar. Start quoting a slightly higher fee. Don’t worry if you lose some bookings, you don’t need to do every one, just the right ones with a good fee. It’s better performing fewer bookings for more money.

Find your current price ceiling

You need to find out that maximum you can currently charge to bring in the most income for the least amount of gigs. To do this, keep increasing your fee. You may find you only get half the number of bookings in a month, but make more money from them than you did when you worked twice as many gigs.

You will get to a point where work coming in will start to drop below the income you got when you were priced low and worked like crazy. Congratulations, you have hit your price ceiling.  Now, quote for shows just below your price ceiling point and you should get enough bookings to bring in more income that before, but with fewer bookings.  Over time, you will find that your client base changes as you move into a higher price bracket market. Each magic gig you do at a higher fee exposes you to future clients in that fee range.  The result of this is that your diary will start to fill up again, and you get too busy. That’s the signal to push for a new higher price ceiling, and so it goes on and on.

What Next: Now let’s look at ways to decide how much you should initially charge for your magic services.