Magicians on Cruise Ships – Getting Work

Eric wants to know how magicians on cruise ships get work

“I am looking at getting a cruise ship magic gig in the next year or so. I am 17 I have no idea where to start or how to get a job on a ship. Do you have any tips?” – Eric

Hi Eric,

We can try to help, but I can assure you, good cruise ship gigs are very tough to get and very tough to hold onto, there is a lot of competition. Now this may sound negative, what I am about to say, but it is really meant as good advice as it can be very hard to get aboard a ship as their entertainer, they can be quite strict about what they require. Having said that it is great to have goals so I admire your ambition.

Firstly, do you have an act? When I speak of an act I mean a 45 minute scripted performance that you already perform to large groups? Most cruise ships require you to have 2 x 45 minute polished acts, fully scripted and with all the details you need such as lighting, music, amplification all mapped out and understood. This is so that you can go onto a ship and rehearse with the tech team and let them know what you require throughout your act, everything can run like clockwork on a ship so you will have limited time to do this. Mostly you will only be on a ship a day before your act so it is a case of getting on the ship and rehearsing for your next nights performance.

They will require professional head shots and promotional photos of yourself, a biography and a promotional video of your act. If you have these things then you are definitely on the right path. If you haven’t got these things then you may struggle to even get close to having yourself booked on a cruise ship sadly. Cruise ships are big business and they cannot afford to test out acts for their evening’s entertainment, they require full professional acts as their customers have paid good money to be looked after on a ship and be entertained well. Everything on ships is scored by passengers, from the entertainment to the food, from the room service to the activities so they require things to be of a certain standard.

A cruise ship will usually get their acts from an entertainment agent, and not book individually, unless you have a history performing for the ship. It is these agencies that you need to work for and to impress, these agencies are the people who will suggest acts to a cruise ship. I would highly recommend checking out some entertainment agencies and seek their direct advice

Checkout the following ebook that had a directory of agents and advice for getting booked.

I hope this helps, please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Best wishes

Ben Williams

Magicians Marketing Problems

by Dominic Reyes 1 Comment

By Dominic Reyes

Dear Dominic,
I am struggling with my marketing. I fail to put into action what I know are good strategies with regard to marketing myself as a magician. Apart from not being the most organised person in the world, I guess that deep down I don't really like marketing & admin. One thing I cannot or will not do is outsource or hire someone to do it for me – I think this would be uneconomic for me.
Regards,
John

Hi John,

Why not just practice and perform magic for fun just as a hobby? Do you really have the desire to perform as a working magician? It’s a lot of hard work, and will take up time you could spend having fun learning new tricks…

Most people just stick to that, and are very happy with their choice. However, if you definitely want to perform commercially, you HAVE to get involved in the business side of things and that involves magicians marketing.

You are going into business as a magician.

I’ve no quick and easy fix for you. You just have to DO IT or get someone to do it for you. If you are not happy to pass on control of your marketing to someone else, then you simply have no choice but to make a PLAN and put that into action.

It sounds like you already know plenty of actionable steps you can take to move your career as a magician forward. So what’s really stopping you?

Is it fear of failure?

Doing nothing guarantees failure. ANYTHING you do, other than sitting and wishing for something, takes you a step closer to your goals.

Is it because it’s no fun?

Playing with magic is fun. Paperwork and magicians marketing can’t compete. But it’s vital groundwork for creating opportunities to:

Perform and get paid for it!

There really isn’t a better way to make your living, than by doing something you would happily do for free anyway. Creating a business out of your magic is worth all the time it will take to build up your reputation, contacts, and client base.

Fear of Decisions

Designing a website, producing marketing material, creating a showreel, finding venues and clients all require decisions. Choice is hard work and scary. It’s always easier to find something else to do, that allows you to avoid committing to a decision. Learning new magic tricks, feels like progress, but if you spend all your time practicing, without doing the work required to market your services, you are practicing for something that isn’t going to happen. That’s a waste of time..

Worried about the cost of magicians marketing?

You don't need to pay an expensive agency to market for you, or shell out for an online service. Do you know someone locally who will help you market for a share of the fee's the work they bring in generates? If not, contact your local university and reach out to the business, marketing, and media departments. Put up a sign on the department notice boards. Would someone like to take you on as a really interesting project? It's good for their CV and you can offer them a percentage of the fee's the extra work brings in.

What to do:

Dreaming, hoping, and praying for something is useful, but it's main benifit is 'hope'. In the face of something that looks impossible, we need to dream or hope that it may be achievable or happen one day. The problem is that hoping doesn't make things happen all by itself. You need to define goals that you can work towards in small manageable steps to make big things happen.

Break up the tasks involved in your marketing into small actionable parts.
The goal can be seen as a ‘project', and the small steps involved in reaching that goal can be seen as ‘actions'.

Here’s an example:

Project:

Creating a magicians website.

Actions:

Look at other magicians websites and make a note of the best points of each.
Create a list of features you want on your website.
Look at design companies to create a website for you.
Create an email that describes the sort of website you would like, with images of design ideas.
Get quotes
Commission a designer to build your website.

The big scary project of designing a website is enough to put anyone off, but if it’s broken up into individual tasks, each one isn’t that scary.. You can do one action each day, working to complete the product over a set period of time.

Now just take the first action and DO IT. Then on to the next and so on until the project is completed.

Here’s another example:

Project:

Get a local residency as a magician.

Actions:

Make a list of local restaurants and venues using google
Call each venue to ask who is responsible for event planning
Create a short letter of introduction
Send out introduction letters to each of the venues
Call each venue to ask if they have received your introduction letter, and ask if you can meet the event planner.

The big ‘project’ is broken up into small, quick, and defined short actions that don’t require too much choice or thinking. You then take the first single action needed to move the project forward and that is you NEXT ACTION, do it and then move onto the next.

If all this sounds like too much hard work, then you need to find someone that will do it for you. It's an essential part of being a professional magician.

What advice would you give John? Leave a comment below:

Magicians Prefer Apple iOS to Android

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

By Dominic Reyes

Do Magicians Prefer Apple iOS to Android?

The team at the magic shop had a small argument the other day about which types of phones and devices magicians tend to prefer. It was caused by a discusion about the range of magic apps and tricks with iphones that have been released for magicians over the last few years.

To settle the argument we looked at the data from the magic shop.

We picked a recent email we sent out to subscribers of the Merchant of Magic Newsletter. It was a segmented group of people who had all opted in to our list and had described themselves as average ability magicians who practiced sleight of hand and were interested in close up magic.

We then ranked the members of that list by the number of purchases they had made over the last 5 years, selecting the top 14,000 magicians that had ordered on many occasions.

That gave us a large sample of 14,000 magicians.

Once we had our sample, we looked at the devices that the sample used to access the email. Here's the results:

The majority of the magicians used Apple iOS rather than Android. On mobile devices, most people used an Apple iOS device. On decktop, most people uses Apple Mail to read the email.

That settled the argument in the magic shop, and we could all get back to work.. If you are developing apps for magicians, you may find this useful.

Why magicians performing websites should be mobile friendly

One point that we found that could be useful for magicians is the amount of people that access our site via mobile rather than decktop. Here's the data:

Google have changed the way they rank websites, so they now give preference in the mobile search listings to mobile optimised sites. Is your magicians website mobile friendly? It's time to check..