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.
Cartoon money is made with hard goods such as mousepads and coasters and aprson, not newspapers. Sure there are a few bucks in newspapers but not a lot. It is noted that the late great Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame made about 80 million dollars in art licensing to every million he made in newspaper syndication. This is about the average. A lunch box deal is worth a lot more than the L.A. Times in the crazy business of cartooning.
Licensing works like any other business. It is basically a trade for money. The artist approaches a manufacturer with a piece of art that he or she thinks would help enhance a product and the manufacturer and firm makes a decision. If it is positive, a licensing deal is made. Businesses also license to each other. Like a beer company logo to Nascar (or vice versa).
Like many businesses, even art licensing has their own association called LIMA.
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.
In time I discovered more manufacturers who made different products than my first ones and was able to make deals with them, using the same contract.
My work has appeared frequently in publications worldwide, I am yet to be syndicated, yet the traditional old way (before the Internet) was to become syndicated first, then manufactured for licensing. Syndication companies are even utilizing the Internet to lure good cartoonists and publish them often in online newspapers. The days of hard copy print may be a thing of the past.
The Internet has opened all kinds of doors for the new and even veteran cartoonist who wants to be published with Ezines, blogs, and thousands of commercial websites that want a humor section on their site to attract customers. It takes a lot of legwork and it doesn’t happen overnight. But it is worth the trouble.
Ten years ago I was working and living in a metal warehouse and had less than a hundred cartoons up on a free domain (I couldn’t afford a www domain). 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.
