ENTER: Devil's Advocate
Why are you wanting to write an eBook? Other than personal ego-gratification what's the purpose of this project?
Since Self-Publishing and especially resources like Lulu.com have come to the fore everyone thinks they are an author and more so, every student of magic that has roughly 3-5 years experience at tinkering, thinks they need to create a book in order to get their name on the map. . .
. . . and before you go there, it's not just me that has made this observation Kenton Knepper and others have shared similar views over the past decade in a number of publications and on-line sources.
Several have penned books on basic magic technique while few have focused on one or two key methods tied to these basics, an taught those new to magic how to routine their slights or how to work with the elementary in order to achieve the miraculous.
Just this past week Bob Cassidy blew me away with a couple of different effects in which he used a technique that I've employed for over a decade and yet, I didn't recognize that this is what he'd done. I was totally floored! But it's because I'd stopped looking for the simple and too, Bob knew how to obfuscate the method and throw the educated off his trail. In Mentalism this is a common practice; not for the sake of oneupsmanship but because the ardent Mentalist seeks a unique type of perfection in their material; a course that allows what we do to be less ready for reverse engineering.
The point is, to simply write a book for the sake of doing so because you can is little more than masturbation. A book needs to deliver something of substance, something people can learn from -- an experience! The magic world is flooded by eBooks penned by 16+ year olds who think they're offering something unique and "original" to the magic market but in truth, they've not done any honest footwork when it comes to researching their material and crediting those that came before them in the evolutionary process and how YOU ended up pulling a given effect or routine together. It may sound like a lot of extra work but such foundation building makes you look more intelligent and vested in the craft -- it shows that you're not just another pipe dreamer.
The other thing most of these overpriced downloads have in common is the lack of honest field testing, which typically takes a solid 6+ months and about a dozen solid reputation and working pros running the effect through the mill, forcing it to failure. If this were done we'd have fewer Jr. High School level physics experiments being sold as impractical magical effects in that the greater truth would come out and the piece would be shot down . . . and I can more than assure you that 90% of what you think is cool and new AIN'T! I have countless files of such material and as Franz Harrary puts it, if he can retain a 10% success ratio in his illusion concepts, he's doing great. Stinemeyer and other noted effect developers of large or small magic are likely to tell you the same whist echoing the need for rigid field testing.
Take a look at what's already being listed via Lulu and other self-publishing sites and sources like Lybrary.com and see for yourself how many booklets are out there with questionable material even though much of it has been weeded out (especially @ Lybrary, Christopher is really good at that, but not perfect. I've found a few that were pure rip-offs in that they weren't even remotely structured in a manner that actually taught the reader something but rather, built up the elementary)
So consider yourself challenged. Don't pull a book together just to do so, give it purpose and quality content; something that would inspire a major player in our field, to volunteer to do your introduction or to at least give you selling quotes to use in your marketing. Don't be satisfied in delivering "more of the same".
Best of luck!
