“You can’t just book magic shows sitting in your basement and posting on Facebook. You need to get out there.”

This was the advice given to me by a good friend and while my ego refused to admit he had a point… he had a really good point. He was out there, talking with people, doing magic everywhere he went and making connections.

As a result, his weekends were jam packed with shows. He also had another full-time job.

I needed to get out there and take on this nerve wracking experience of showing my vulnerability. It’s the equivalent of asking someone one a date without certainty they were even interested in you.

Fear preyed on the emotion of rejection and my goodness, I didn’t want to be rejected (both in magic and in relationships).

His advice is in line with any other magician I know who was doing the same thing. Their word-of-mouth referrals were above and beyond because of the hustle they put into getting the word out.

The advice is simple, not easy… and it works.

Even though I don’t do magic shows anymore, I still get the occasional call from people who had my name dropped from others requesting for me to do a show. I don’t have any ads or web presence with my magic, but I’m still getting calls.

There’s a glut of people right now giving advice to writers on how to sell more books or get noticed. Most of that advice is related to gaming social media, keywords on Amazon, email lists, or some other system put in place.

However ,the advice of any wildly successful author from the past hundred years on the subject hasn’t changed:

Keep writing, finish what you write and put it out there.

Simple advice, but hard to do.

Simple financial advice: spend less than you earn.

How many struggle with that one?

The simplest of all advice is this:

Work on your craft and keep connecting with others.

Hard work doesn’t always get appropriately rewarded, but when luck strikes the hard-worker, it accelerates their efforts into the stratosphere.

I have friends who are doing incredibly well as writers, photographers, performers, speakers, musicians and wedding officiants just following that bit of advice.

Take the simple advice and do the hard work of actually following it.