The Business Side Of Show Business by Caroline Ravn | Book Review

Let me start with a slightly uncomfortable question and I promise that I'm asking this for as much as myself as anyone else watching this video. But have you ever been told that you're really good performing, maybe even very good, and yet somehow you're still struggling to make it feel like an actual career? So you're doing gigs, you're putting yourself out there, you're working hard but the money side feels messy, inconsistent or just vaguely confusing. If this sounds familiar then this book is going to feel uncomfortably relevant. Even in other forms of business this book helps massively, not for just magicians. In the beginning I said it was the same for me, however I'm not a gigging magician but I've been able to use bits of this book for my own personal business with my photography videography and other things like that. So like I said it's not just for magicians, it helps massively for magicians but this is sort of a more widespread help book. And today I want to talk about The Bizarre Side of Show Business by Caroline Raymond which is one of these books that doesn't care how good your sleight of hand is or how strong your axe feels, instead it sits you down and asks you a much more awkward question. The awkward question is, how exactly are you planning to turn what you're doing into something sustainable? And yes that question alone already makes a lot of performers want to quietly look away. At a high level this book is built around a very simple but very often ignored idea, show business is still a business. And that sounds obvious until you realise how many performers treat the business side like an annoying afterthought. So I got a chance to see Caroline perform at the Blackpool Magic Convention this year and the show was fantastic and well worth a watch if you can get to see her where she's performing. I didn't get a chance to see her lecture which I would have loved to see, to see how it fell in line with the book but maybe next time. The wife also got up on stage with Caroline for a routine as a spectator and at the end we all got a photo together and asked Caroline for one of her sponge balls from the final trick and she said yes but as long as it was one of the small balls because she needs them for other acts but here's the photo. Anyway we all love buying magic and we love practicing and we all love performing. We love the reactions that you get but emails, pricing, contracts, marketing, branding and planning all feel like admin and admin feels like the enemy of creativity. This book doesn't let you hide behind the excuse. It makes the case that avoiding the business side doesn't make you more artistic, it just makes everything harder and more stressful than it needs to be. One of the strongest ideas running throughout the book is that nobody, nobody at all, is coming to rescue you. Clients don't magically understand what you offer, audiences don't automatically know your value and opportunities don't appear just because you're talented. If you can't clearly explain what you do, who it's for and why it's worth paying for then clients won't do the work for you. The book keeps coming back to the idea that clarity is not optional. If people are confused about what you offer they won't book you or they'll book you cheaply. In terms of websites and social media if someone wanted to book a magician or book you specifically as a magician go onto your website and social media and there are no videos of you performing, no photos, nothing like that. They don't know you as a person, you as a business, they can't see how you are as a magician and the whole thing of a magician is you'll be able to perform tricks for people. So even just small things like the end of a trick and the audience's reaction, something like that on socials is a massive step in helping you reach out to potential business and showing how you are as a magician and this book goes over a massive amount of different things so social media and everything else as well of how to market yourself as a magician. There's a big emphasis on positioning and not in a flashy marketing sense but in a very practical grounded way. The book makes it clear that clients don't hire performers for techniques, methods or theory, they hire solutions and you're there to make an event better, to entertain guests and to reduce awkwardness, to create moments which people remember. When you understand that it becomes much easier to talk about your work without feeling awkward or salesy. You stop selling tricks and magic and you start explaining outcomes. So instead of saying oh yes I can perform double lift 20 times on the night no bother at all, you want to market and say this is me, I do performances and routines and this is the reactions that audience get. So people want to book you based on the experience they're going to get from you as in not experience of how many years you've been doing it but the experience of having you there and how you light up the room. Another major theme is professionalism which again sounds obvious until you realise how many performers quietly struggle with it. Responding clearly to emails, being consistent with pricing, knowing exactly what you offer, showing up prepared and setting boundaries all might have far more than most people want to admit. The book makes the point that clients don't hire mystery, they hire confidence and clarity and confidence in this case often comes from being organised rather than charismatic. Marketing is another area where the book offers a really useful reframing. So instead of treating marketing as self-promotion, it treats it as uncertainty reduction. So clients want to know what will happen if they hire you, they want to know you'll be reliable, easy to work with and that you can make them look good. When you understand that, marketing stops being about shouting how amazing you are and starts being about making decisions easier for the person on the other side and again that goes back to showing things of not how good you are as a magician but the kind of experience that you're going to create for people watching you. The book also leans heavily into long-term thinking which is something that a lot of performers avoid because it forces you to be honest with yourself. Talks about pricing properly and understanding your costs, saying no to bad gigs and confusing being busy with being successful. One of the more uncomfortable truths in the book is that constantly undercharging doesn't make you noble or humble, just makes it harder to sustain what you're doing. So that idea alone is probably worth the price of the book for a lot of people. I always say this in any type of business you have, so you have people in the wedding photography, wedding videography business, they'll come in and they'll say I'll do a full day video, a full day photo for £300 and there's nothing that you can compete with. They may be getting 50 bucks a year compared to someone else getting 10 bucks a year, however they'll probably be making about the same amount of money and the person doing 10 bucks a year has less work to do than the person doing 50 weddings a year for the same amount of money. So putting in this amount of effort and this amount of effort comes the same, however generally you need to sort of work out where your pricing scale is and it's great to be busy, however if you're getting paid pennies for performing then is it really worth it unless you are doing it to get any experience, but to make a business out of it and be full time then you need to work out what you are worth and the things in this book help you decide different things like that and work out what you are worth and what to charge. To be clear though this isn't a hype book, there are no shortcuts, no overnight success stories and no promises of easy money. What it offers instead is fundamentals, so there's consistency, clarity, communication and treating what you do like a real business even when it feels small. It's not glamorous advice but it's the kind that quietly saves you from a lot of future stress. So who is this book actually for? If you perform purely as a hobby and don't care about money or consistency then this might feel a bit heavy even though it's a small book, but if you perform regularly, you want better gigs, feel awkward talking about pricing or suspect you're undercharging and hoping nobody notices then this book is aimed at you. Especially if you've ever thought I just love performing, I just hate everything else around it. So final thoughts on the business side of show business by Karine Raven is that it won't make you a better performer on stage, it won't improve your technique or your material, but it might make you have a much better performer off stage in emails, conversations, negotiations and planning. If you want to perform to be more than just a passion project then this side of things matters more than most like to admit. Thanks for watching, if you read this book I'd generally love to hear your thoughts and if the business side of performing has always felt confusing, awkward or overwhelming then this may be a very solid place to start. If you stuck around this long, a very solid place to go would be to the video on the screen to continue watching content from this channel. But until next time, see ya.