Tag: magician promo

T Nelson Downs Throw Out Card

Recently I came across a T. Nelson Downs throw out card! These were used as promo items by the magician, but this particular one was sponsored by Bicycle Playing Cards!

T Nelson Downs Throw Out Card
T Nelson Downs Throw Out Card

I’m not sure if this was something that would have been given out by Bicycle or just Downs.

I’ve thought about doing a batch of playing cards like this. Not functional cards, but as promotional items that I can autograph after shows. I think it’s cooler than a postcard, and smaller, so I can carry more for the same weight in my suitcase.

It’s a cool piece that’s a great addition to my collection!

-Louie

Get Your Stuff Together First!

The other night I was chatting with a magician that I had met at a zoom magic show. He was asking me about working comedy clubs.

There were a couple of things, first he didn’t know his Laughs Per Minute (LPM). That’s a huge thing to know if you want to work in comedy. It’s a good metric to how funny your show is. To calculate this, count all of the laughs in your show and divide that by the length of your show. So if you get 90 laughs in a 45 minute show your LPM’s are 2. A stand up comedian will get about 6 or more, however most magicians won’t get that high. Magic has information that needs to be conveyed for a trick to work. As Bob Sheets once told me there’s comedy time and magic time and they don’t overlap.

Then I asked this magician for his website and video and he said his “site sucked” and his video wasn’t good. I told him that you NEED the correct promo if you want to level up or move into another market. I guess the other option to move into the market is to be soo good that you get work, but that’s a much longer and harder road to take. You’d literally be doing garbage gigs to hope someone sees you that books better gigs and then keep stepping up. There’s nothing wrong with this way, but it’s a lot more legwork than just sending out video and having bookers visit your website.

In a nutshell, my advice for levelling up your show in your current market or to break into a new market is to look at what people who are already in that market have for promo and get your stuff to that level and then start selling! If you reach out to a booker and they ask for a 2-3 min sizzle reel and two 5-8 minute unedited full routines, can you immediately send that? No booker wants to wait a month for you to send them stuff. Sure there’s the odd exotic request for an unusual piece of promo that may take you a couple of days to make, but the booker will understand if it’s truly a strange request.

I know this isn’t a fun answer to how to get work, but it’s what most people need to hear. If you don’t like your promo, how do you expect anyone else to?

-Louie

Making Videos More Watchable

When putting out videos whether it’s social media videos or promo videos for my shows or magic products, one thing I try to avoid are things that can cause the viewer to click away. I’m not an authority on this, but I’ve noticed that using less copyrighted music seems to give me less ads on my videos. That’s the last thing you when someone is watching you promo, them having to get through an ad!

One of the ways that I do this is with music where I license the rights to use, so there’s no copyright issue that YouTube or whatever then tries to monetize. The service I use is Envato Elements and it has a HUGE catalog of music that you can sort by length, style, beats per min and even by instruments!

Another thing that I do on my booking website is that my videos are hosted by JWplayer. This allows me to host videos and not have YouTube put ads on it or “suggested videos” at the end of it. In fact I have the video on my booking website to play “suggested videos” of mine in a specific order if someone wants to keep watching more than my general sizzle reel!

I think that paying for a service like JWplayer is totally worth it as after my promo I don’t have to worry about YouTube suggesting a competitor’s video!
-Louie

Postcards!

I was on the road and ran out of things to autograph for people at the show, so I made a quick order for some new postcards

Magician autograph postcards

Printing has changed in my lifetime. My first business cards cost way more than these postcards and were only black and white…and took about a month to make. I had these in about a week from when I ordered them.

You will notice that on the back I have Magic and Comedy, and when listed, I try to put magic first. It’s a little thing where people like to use “comedy magician” , however in my show the magic is first…at least in my mind.

There’s really no excuse, aside from laziness to not have promo. I will go on record saying that sometimes laziness is a valid excuse!

-Louie

Studio Promo Videos…

I’m thinking about updating my promo video and was watching some other magician’s promo videos this morning. One thing I noticed that I don’t like, however I’m not sure if anyone else notices or not are videos that don’t show the performer in front of a crowd. Here’s one I found from a magician named Alfred, who from the video has great technical skills, however there’s no audience:

What that says to me is the person doesn’t do many shows, I could be wrong. I honestly don’t know if that’s what a booker sees?

I also don’t know how I feel about “studio” shots in a promo video. I understand that a lot of the time it can be the only way to get a certain piece of video, like a close up that wouldn’t really be possible without really annoying the audience. I can usually tell when a studio shot is mixed in with live shots, the energy feels different.

I guess my feelings on promo videos that don’t show actual performances clips is that they aren’t for me.
-Louie

Let There Be Light!

When you’re doing virtual shows, a lot goes into them. More than just the tricks. Someone recently posted their “promo video” for virtual shows. There are some good elements to this, like the people reacting, then some bad elements, like everything else.

Here’s the video:

The big problem with the video is the guy’s lighting is horrible! Yes, I understand that some of the effects he’s doing require special lighting, but he’s not even doing that right, you can light the effect correctly and make it not look like you’re performing in a closet.

Here’s a screenshot from the above video:

Does that look like something you’d pay money to watch?

Not me.

Does that mean it’s a bad show?

Not necessarily.

Right now we all need to learn about lighting, video production, etc and we all need to learn the basics about all of it.

Make it Easy…

Yesterday I wrote about the biggest problem with most magician’s promo video is the audio. Last night I was playing with the idea of adding subtitles to a promo video to help with bad audio. Here’s what I made: I think that using captions works when used sparingly. I don’t think I’d want to watch … Continue reading “Make it Easy…”

Yesterday I wrote about the biggest problem with most magician’s promo video is the audio. Last night I was playing with the idea of adding subtitles to a promo video to help with bad audio. Here’s what I made:

I think that using captions works when used sparingly. I don’t think I’d want to watch a whole video with bad audio that was captioned. That’d be a bit much, as a booker, I’d be worried that the performer would be unable to understand in a live show.


Keep at upping your audio game as much as you up your sleight of hand game and you’ll do great!

Good Audio…

Whenever I work with an act I always try to watch their promo video. I also do this whenever someone posts their “new” promo video on social media. I do my best to watch them all the way through, but I would say I bail on about 60% of them halfway through. Why don’t I … Continue reading “Good Audio…”

Whenever I work with an act I always try to watch their promo video. I also do this whenever someone posts their “new” promo video on social media. I do my best to watch them all the way through, but I would say I bail on about 60% of them halfway through.


Why don’t I watch them all the way through?


It’s simple, they are really bad. For me the make or break thing for a promo video is good audio, with video quality coming is second. With all the HD cameras now and how cheap they are, there’s no reason you video should have the resolution of a 1980’s sitcom.


Let’s get back to the audio, which is the big one. If the audio isn’t clear, you are better off not having any audio. There are tons of promo videos I’ve seen from comedy magicians, and you can’t understand what they are saying…what’s the point?

I was guilty of having bad audio, until I figured out how to do it. I now record my audio with a voice recorder.

voice recorder




There are two ways to do it, directly off the soundboard, or off of a mic that plugs into the voice recorder. Personally I prefer the mic as it gets my voice clearly (most of the time) and it also picks up the person on stage and audience reactions. I can then mix this with the audio that the camera takes and have audio that’s easy to understand on my promo.

TLDR: they need to be able to understand you.