Love it, leave it or change it

This is quite a good say­ing that some­one remind­ed me of some time ago. I have been think­ing about it real­ly hard. I’m talk­ing about what to do in mag­ic in these times, and what to pub­lish and share with the mag­ic com­mu­ni­ty and how to do that.

After see­ing what’s going on at the Black­pool con­ven­tion this year I was sort of hor­ri­fied. Hor­ri­fied from the fact that every­thing expand­ed to such a degree and hor­ri­fied from see­ing what kind of peo­ple are run­ning around at this con­ven­tion. Of course, every­body has the right to attend almost every­thing on this plan­et. But then I was think­ing how it were if I were to share all my secrets with all of them. And this is where I rad­i­cal­ly changed my atti­tude.

I real­ize that an esti­mat­ed 70% of the peo­ple attend­ing the biggest mag­ic con­ven­tion ever are not the kind of magi­cian I would want to share my knowl­edge and ideas with. What I saw on all the pic­tures from the dealer’s hall in Black­pool con­vinced me again not to attend this any­more.

I’m ful­ly aware of the fact that mag­ic has changed a lot and that in these days the com­mer­cial aspect is pre­dom­i­nant. I see pic­tures of deal­ers sell­ing their stuff to any­body who is inter­est­ed in. Even to obvi­ous lay­men of mag­ic (at least, it appears from judg­ing the pic­tures). Look at the var­i­ous pic­tures from the dealer’s hall and you will see all this has changed into a huge indus­try, sim­i­lar to the toy indus­try. Gim­micks for grown-up kids, prices, sell­ing and cus­tomers are impor­tant. But not the secrets. Read­ing some of the quotes here made me think .…

Good mag­ic has always been depen­dent on how well the secrets are pro­tect­ed. There have been times where real­ly impor­tant stuff was kept and han­dled in the under­ground. That means that only a select­ed few peo­ple, who were con­sid­ered wor­thy of it and could han­dle those secrets, had access to this knowl­edge. Nowa­days every­body can know every­thing he wants; even stuff he can­not han­dle prop­er­ly.

I ful­ly agree with Jim Steinmeyer’s opin­ion that magi­cians are guard­ing an emp­ty safe (con­cern­ing secrets). So prob­a­bly I’m not going to change any­thing. But what I can do is to lim­it the access to my own mate­r­i­al.

I don’t want to say that it is a good idea to keep an inter­est­ed per­son away from some of the secrets he wants to know. We live in a free world and infor­ma­tion is flow­ing freely as well. But I don’t think it is rea­son­able to make it too easy for any­body to access cer­tain stuff. One thing to make sure this hap­pens is to do adver­tis­ing in the big mag­ic mag­a­zines, on the Inter­net in the social media, and so on. Anoth­er way to make sure to dis­trib­ute the secrets is the price. All this price dump­ing, all that the bar­gain pack­ages the deal­ers are offer­ing only helps in dis­trib­ut­ing secrets on a big scale, con­se­quent­ly cater­ing to peo­ple who are only inter­est­ed in the know-how and in get­ting a good price.

Con­cern­ing my most impor­tant work, THE DE COVA FILES, I will change the pro­ce­dure. These books are not going to be adver­tised on the offi­cial mag­i­cal mar­ket. They will not be avail­able from any deal­er (except me). You will get infor­ma­tion on it only if you are real­ly inter­est­ed and into mag­ic. Only then you will have the knowl­edge where and when to get the books. Oth­er­wise, you prob­a­bly won’t even know they exist. And they will sure­ly not be offered cheap­ly or with that usu­al dis­count, pack­age deals and bar­gain stuff.

Love it: yes, I do love mag­ic and I do love the secrets.

Leave it: no way!

Change it:  I just set what I’m going to change.

“A secret’s worth depends on the peo­ple from whom it must be kept.” – Car­los Ruiz Zafón, The Shad­ow of the Wind

“The best way of keep­ing a secret is to pre­tend there isn’t one.” ― Mar­garet Atwood, The Blind Assas­sin

Pass it on!