How to Publish Your First Magic Product
In this blog, I’m going to run through how I released my first commercial product with a major retailer in magic whilst being a full-time student at the age of 16.
I published Portal in 2019 with Ellusionist. If you don’t know, Portal is a signed coin in can effect, it was published as a digital product.
Releasing my first product was a big moment for me. Since I was 12, all I wanted was to show my creations to the magic community. I think I wanted a product because of companies like Theory 11 and Ellusionist making their creators look like rockstars.
Guys like Daniel Madison, Eric Jones, and Calen Morelli were the ‘cool' ones in magic.
One of my magic-friends Simon used to say this about magicians and creators:
“As cool as you think you are, or people think you are, you’re still a magician.”
I could talk a lot about what Portal did for me, and why it was important. But to be honest, that’s probably not why you’re reading this. So instead of continuing to talk about that, I’ll tell you exactly how you can release your first product in 3 steps.
Create as much as you can.
Every day after school since 7th grade, I would try to create magic.
I made some weird stuff and a lot of really bad stuff. Most of the ideas I had probably weren’t original. None of that is important though, what’s important is that I was exercising my creative muscles.
I came up with hundreds of ideas before Portal.
Show people.
I would ask other magicians for feedback on my creations, to improve them. In fact, I’d love to give a mention to Steve Rowe, Sylar, Tom Elderfield, Lloyd Barnes, and Rory Adams to name a few. They put up with me sending countless random, stupid tricks with items like starbursts and matchboxes.
If you’re comfortable with being in front of a camera (or even if you’re not), show your creations to people via social media. Instagram is so powerful, and it’s easy for a company to find your creation if you tag the right people.
Share those videos to Facebook groups like Magic Session, you’ll get feedback (and an ego boost if it’s a good trick).
If you want, collaborate with people, improve your effect. The Ellusionist discord is a great place to show people what you’re working on.
Also, there are Ellusionist employees lurking on that server that might want to publish your stuff, it’s not a bad place to be.
Gino, who is a great creator, published his first effect recently through the power of that discord.
Submit your ideas.
A lot of magic companies have “submit a trick” pages, you’ll usually find them at the bottom of the page or as part of the “contact us” section
Your video should be quick, clean, and to the point. They will normally want you to show a separate, brief, explanation video too.
The video shouldn’t be majorly over produced, shooting on your iPhone is fine. And if it’s a practical and workable effect, you should totally include a live performance.
There you have it, that’s exactly how to publish your first magic product (with a company).
If you’d like to know how to self-publish a magic product, you can learn here.