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Free or Cost Price Magic Tricks – Ebooks and Downloads – Good?

What price should magic ebooks and downloads sell for?

Magician Justin Miller has announced that he is dropping the price of his instant download magic tricks to almost cost price. Most of his back catalog of magic trick downloads are dropping down to £2.

Taking the example of Lewis C. K who recently released a comedy video online at $5, Justin hopes to gain a wider audience for his magic and aims to reduce download online piracy of his work.

The Merchant of Magic has a great deal of respect for Justin Miller and his work in magic. We think he is brave to be trying this business model out. Will this business model work for selling magic tricks?

Magic Tricks Prices Vs Piracy.

There are many different opinions on copyright and piracy, and both sides have strong and weak points in their arguments. However, we would say that dropping the price of a product won’t do much to discourage it. People that are comfortable using torrent sites to download for free will continue to do so. Their first port of call will always be their torrent search program. If someone doesn’t believe they should pay for another person’s work, then I’m not sure charging less will persuade them to change that behavior.

From our own experience, magic Ebooks and downloads that we sell for a couple of pounds get pirated just as often as more expensive products.

If a low price was a defense against piracy, than Apple and Amazon would have already tackled it by selling music downloads for under £1. Music piracy doesn’t seem to have been reduced by their low pricing.

A low price point on magic ebooks may also make sharing feel more ‘acceptable’ as the value of the work becomes low and the perceived unethical nature of the act of sharing for free is reduced.

A low price point leads to more sales?

Another argument for free or low price magic trick downloads and magic ebooks is that it will lead to more sales. This does seem to be the case for magic trick downloads that start off with a high price tag and then drop to almost cost price. However, the increase in sales tends to be short lived. It seems to be seen as a ‘sale’ and and opportunity to buy the magic downloads at a bargain price. Once the initial publicity of the price drop has faded, sales tend to level off to a normal level, but the lower price means that the creator of the magic trick doesn’t get a significant income stream from the product over time. This can lead to:

Chasing the release hype.

When products have a low margin, their return often comes from the first few weeks of their release, as publicity and marketing for the product is taking place. Once that drops off, the income from the product fades. A constant stream of new magic tricks need to be released to continue a stream income stream to support the efforts of the artist/creator. This can lead to rushed, or half thought out projects going to market and being over hyped. Quality is far more important than quantity for a magic creator over the long term. A low price model focuses on quantity of sales rather than building up a catalog of quality work at a price that reflects the products value and the effort required to produce it.

Marketing, Magicians reputation and brand awareness.

Free and low price downloads and magic ebooks models work on sales volume. There is little or no margin for promotion and a low incentive for others to invest in adverting and marketing for each new release.

Creators that have already created a name for themselves through releasing premium products with standard profit margins have the advantage of customer awareness. They already have a reputation to bring in a level of sales needed for a near cost price model. Very talented magicians become noticed by the efforts of publishers to promote the magicians brand. Justin Miller became a household name in magic through his talents and awesome magic tricks, but also through the efforts of publishers such as Ellusionist and Paul Harris Presents, endorsing his work and investing in promotion, distribution and marketing. The publishers put a spotlight on his talents and introduced them to a huge magic audience.

Will a cost price model discourage publishers and marketers from helping new talented magicians get noticed? Does it work for well know (through the traditional business model) artists such as the Grateful dead or Lewis C.K, but leave up and coming creators products on their own in an ocean of other free or low price products? Word of mouth does work very well, but some mouths can shout louder than others.

Building up a customer list.

Another popular argument is that giving away your work will bring in a large mailing list that can be offered additional products and services. This may work very well, but magic is a super small market, and may not have the volume of customers needed to make a list like this a viable model. Groupon is a fine example: Groupon is essentially a mailing list. They ran into problems because of the demographic of the list. They built a list of people that want something for free or at low cost. That was their main target audience. Many retailers that used Groupon found that customers responded to the ‘offer’ but didn’t tend to convert to other premium services the retailers offered them. Building a list based on attracting customers looking for bargains could have limited use. The members of the list want cheap or free magic and special offers. The list may not be as effective for future products that don’t match that price point.

Future Products.

Devaluing a back catalog is one thing, but what happens with new releases? Would they be advertised at a normal price and instantly reduced to cost?

New release! Should be £30 but only £2

How would a creator/artist convince customers that their future releases are worth anything more than cost price? Over time, the low price becomes associated with the brand and is expected. Higher price work would need a very good justification to warrant it’s ticket value.

We wish Justin Miller every success with his new pricing system. It will be interesting to see how it works out over the long term. Although we have concerns for him, and are not convinced that devaluing his back catalog is a wise move, we respect his intentions and his courage to give it a go.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below:

How Magicians Can Link Their Magic Tricks to Create Continuity

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

Let’s explore how magicians can link the magic tricks they perform, by using continuity. One of the skills that separate professional magicians and amateurs is the degree of continuity within their magic tricks. Most magicians perform one of their magic tricks, put it away and then start performing another one. There is no continuity between the magic tricks they perform. Each of the magic tricks is unrelated. The tricks are bookmarked by a moment when the magician puts it away and starts another trick. Let’s look at introducing continuity into the magic tricks you perform.

Performing one magic trick, then putting it away and taking out another is like being a comedian that fires off unrelated gags. The comedian tells a range of jokes, knowing that sooner or later, one of them will hit the spot and make the audience laugh. Your magic can be much better than that. You can build in a theme that runs across all your magic tricks and ties them together to create something greater than the sum of it’s parts.

How Your Magic Starts.

Rather than getting out the props for a new magic trick, could the previous trick introduce the props for the next? Could it make an object appear that you then use for your next trick?

Here are 5 quick easy card magic tricks bound by continuity. Notice that they flow together as they tell a larger story about the most amazing playing card the magician has ever seen.

You take a shuffled deck of playing cards and magically find all four aces. You explain that one of the aces has very special properties.

The aces are then used for a mentalism trick, and the spectator is asked to choose one, and it matches a prediction because it is the ‘special card’

Once the prediction has been made, the chosen card vanishes and appears in your wallet

You then destroy it, only for it to reform, as a torn and restored playing card.

One corner remains unhealed. It vanishes and appears in an impossible location.

How Your Props Vanish.

A previous magic trick, could give an explanation to your spectators, as to why an object vanishes in a magic trick that follows. David Roth uses a Portable Hole, and it’s a great example of this. The idea of a portable hole that makes your props vanish can run through all your magic tricks, appearing to cause trouble for the magician and bring props in and out of play.

Thinking about joining the magic tricks you perform into a set that has continuity and a story line that runs through it, will greatly improve the reactions you get from your magic tricks. It will improve your pocket management, the timing and flow the act and will create an overall ‘message’ that is far more memorable to spectators than a generic magician what performed a series of unrelated magic tricks.

How Magicians Use Spectator Memory Against Them – Magic Tricks Tips

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

Learn magic tricks that use a spectators memory against them with a playing card

By Paul Knight

Magicians can easily use memory techniques that will influence how spectators describe the magic tricks that are shown to them.

Often as magicians we forget to perform through the eyes of a layman. Magicians fully understand the route their magic tricks take from beginning to end. However, the spectators will often miss details that happen between the beginning and the end of the magic trick. This is human nature and the way our minds are designed to work. The brain will form a shape to events that happen, and the contents within become an assumption.

The Primacy and Recency Effect in your Magic Tricks.

For many years, Psychologists have understand that subjects in experiments will best remember events that happened at the start and at the end of a particular event.
Remembering the first part of an event or experience is called The Primacy Effect. It’s one of the reasons why first impressions are hard to change.

The last or most recent parts of an event are also remembered well by test subjects (The Recency Effect).

The middle of an event is often forgotten, or can easily be overshadowed by events that happened at the beginning or at the end of an event.

This is one of the reasons why your opener magic tricks and closer Magic tricks are so important. They are the magic tricks your act will most often be judged on.

The start and finish are important.

The human brain is amazing. It’s easy to think that we simply observe information and use the data to understand the world around us. However, our minds also apply their own filters and processing to the information it receives.

Can you read this sentence:

‘I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg.’

Oxford university conducted an experiment and came to the conclusion that so long as the first letter and the last letter of a word are in the right places the brain can very quickly reorder the letters in between and compose the word it is intended to be, creating an assumption. It is the brain fooling itself.
Often, when you perform your magic tricks, spectators may approach you afterwards and retell the events of the magic trick that they believe they have witnessed. You will notice that many of the events within the magic tricks you performed, never happened.
Magicians can learn magic tricks that use the spectators memory to their benefit.

Using a Playing Card

Let’s use this approach with magic tricks that use a playing card.

The card through window magic trick is an excellent example. Often spectators will approach you later on after the trick, sometimes on the same day, sometimes days later and convinced themselves that there was no playing card on the outside of the window before, and that they signed the card. They never looked at the window before the trick, and they never signed the playing card until after the playing card was found on the window. They are filling in events that never happened to sell the story.

Card to wallet magic trick tricks are also a good example of a spectators faulty memory of events. At the beginning of the magic trick a playing card is selected and signed and then lost in the deck of playing cards. At the end of the magic trick, it is found in the magicians wallet within a zippered compartment. If you put a few practically self working red herrings in between the start, and after the magic trick that solidifying things that didn’t actually happen, the spectators will solidly believe a different course of events has happened.

The spectator believes that the playing card may be his selection, but when he looks at the playing card, it states ‘look in the card case’. In the card case is a playing card that reads ‘not here, look in the pocket’. In your pocket, you could have a playing card that reads ‘not here either, look inside the zipper compartment of the wallet’. Then the spectator unzips the wallet and finds their signed playing card.

When recounted afterwards, the spectators often say that the playing card was in the wallet. The playing card transported to the card case, then into the magicians pocket and finally back to the zippered compartment of the wallet they were holding from the beginning. This is a moment to monopolise the situation. Notice that they are already creating moments within the magic tricks that never occurred. Magicians can strengthen this with a white lie or two!

Here are a few simple lines you could use when you do card magic tricks. The lines may help enhance the magic tricks after the event. Using specific language within the magic tricks paint a more impossible and impressive memory for the spectators.

“Yes, and I never even touched the deck of cards.”

“You could have thought of any playing card!”

“You signed your playing card before we even began.”

“You held the deck of cards from the very beginning.”

“And you thoroughly shuffled the deck of cards!”

Spectators will sometimes remember the premise set at the beginning of your magic tricks and the finale. The start and end. As magicians, we can aim to learn magic tricks that use this psychology to our benefit. Our job as magicians are to leave our audiences with magical memories, and the responsibility is on us to create that memory. If the audience willingly show they want to fill in the gaps with their own images, is it wrong that we should expand on this within our magic tricks? An innocent white lie or two is not a bad thing.

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