I completely agree that people not wanting come up with their own presentation is a major problem in magic, but if you just step back and look at the bigger picture then you'll see that it IS our problem. All of us. Anyone who is a magician stands to be affected by other practising magicians, because when you are in a restaurant and you introduce yourself as a magician, there will be those who become immediately disinterested because of the impact others of our trade have made on them.
Something you all seem to overlook is that allowing the bad magicians to remain bad does not reduce competition and make us seem better by comparison - it simply means that we will have diabolical magicians, calling themselves magicians and trying to get gigs making us ALL look bad.
Ok, I spoke out of line in regard to this point. Where I live, there are not many magicians who perform on a regular basis at all, so most of my spectators have not seen a live magician before. I apologize for not taking other perspectives into account.
If the artist is aiming to make money, I'm sure they would, however, we can't make judgments on anyone's motives for releasing material.Why should the artist show how they present their material? Because presumably the way that they perform it is, to their mind, the best way of presenting it to make it the most entertaining; and the more entertaining a trick can be made to seem, the more sales they are likely to make. Also it would seem to make a sort of intuitive sense that if one knows a trick and is planning on teaching it, then you would show it in the way that you use it rather than making something up that is less good than the real thing to advertise. That, my friends, would be counter-productive!
OK I'm almost done. When you read a book, they typically describe the effect and then go on to explain the method. In a book, would you expect to find a description that played the effect right down to a sh!tty trick, or would you expect to see it being explained as something more? Obviously the description is there to make it seem really awesome...
Not in a LOT of cases. In a lot of cases, they don't play it up or down, they just describe it as it is.
e.g.
In effect. A card is selected by the company. The performer places it on the table to the right. Another card is selected and performer places it
on table to the left. The first drawn card is now placed on top of the deck, which was lying on the table, and the two selected cards are commanded to change places and found to have done so.
[From Erdnase]
Most books preface the effect like this. Most magic products have the effect written on the box/packet like this. The "something more" comes from the method.
I work in a magic stall, and magic does not sell itself. I have NEVER had a lay customer come into the stall, read a trick's description, and then based on that, make a decision to buy. If I didn't demonstrate the tricks, or at least describe them in greater detail, my sales would be next to none.