Making Money In Cartooning: It’s Not The Newspapers
In my ten years of cartooning, people often want to talk about the money. They say things like, “You must be rich with all those newspapers you are in.” In the first place, I’m not in that many newspapers and not even syndicated. Even if I was in syndication, that is not where the money is in cartooning. Speaking of syndication, the lottery has better odds.
The real money in funny pictures is in art licensing. Art licensing is a huge business, almost 100 billion dollars per year, yet not many know about it. Basically it is the process of putting an art image on a manufactured product from lunch boxes to tshirts to greeting cards. Most of the public rarely sees this business activity as they are too busy buying the end product.
Art licensing can work in a variety of ways. It can be an individual artist approaching a manufacturer with an image that the artist feels will make the manufacturer’s products sell better. Sometimes a deal is made, more often not. When it is, the artist receives a negotiated royalty, a percentage of each sale. There are other types of licensing that work with sponsorships, such as an oil company sponsoring Nascar and they get to put their logo on an actual race car.
LIMA is the industry association. One does not have to be a member to be in the art licensing game but it doesn’t hurt. Such associations are a great way to make contacts.
But what if the artist is not traditional. Maybe he/she is a cartoonist. Sometimes deals are done the opposite way in this situation. A manufacturer of, say collectible clocks or lunch boxes will approach Disney and ask for the exclusive licensing deal on that product for a certain image or series of images.
I startes as an unknown cartoonist thinking I would be syndicated within the first months or so because “my concepts were so good and different”. I was fortunate to learn that was my ego talking. So I approached a several trade journals in need of theme cartoons with their articles and sold them for what I could. I slowly built a portfolio and finally was able to take it to a manufacturer/drop-shipper who was willing to take a chance and make the products with a royalty split. I did not have a licensing agent so my attorney handled the contract for me. It is always a good idea, if your strength is in art and not numbers to have a professional in another area (like an attorney or agent) do that part of the job.
As time went by, I found more manufacturers who made different products than my first ones and was able to make deals with them, using the same contract template.
The old-school tradition of cartooning was dictated by the big syndication firms. First you become syndicated, then you get to sell your products and create wealth. Those days are gone thanks to the Internet. One can enter the field in the way one feels comfortable. I am yet to be officially syndicated though my cartoons appear worldwide on a daily basis.
If you are new to cartooning, or even a veteran looking for new outlets, the Internet offers many. It does not happen overnight. It took me a decade. But it will happen if one is persistent.
In 1997, I began my cartoon venture metal warehouse in rural Mississippi. I could not even afford a website and didn’t even know how to work the Internet, much less a computer. I bought some of those “For Dummies” books and learned as I worked. Now I have eight domains, seven stores with almost 80,000 products in about 100 different categories , and the most visited offbeat cartoon site on the Internet, Londons Times Cartoons with over 8500 original images and almost 9 million visitors. That’s not so bad for ten year’s work, at least not for me.
One might say I paid a heavy price to get this off the ground. But there are a million stories like mine out there. Mine is but just one. Anything worth having takes hard work. Just enjoy the ride and you’ll see that the benefits are worth more than the pain.
