Many think cartoonists become wealthy from newspaper syndication. They don't. Newspapers only pay a few dollars per cartoon and the cartoonist splits that with the syndication firm. Not only that, of the hundreds of thousands of cartoons that are out there trying to make their way to newspaper print, only about .000000001% make it. One has a better chance of winning the lottery.
So how does the cartoonist make his or her money? The most lucrative part of cartooning is a little-known but huge business called "image licensing". Image licensing has been around a long time. It is known to be about an 80 billion dollar a year business, yet so few people know about it. That could be because, though the end user is the general retail buying public, this demographic of our population rarely sees or cares to see what goes on behind the scenes.
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.
Like many businesses, even art licensing has their own association called LIMA.
Occasionally a licensing deal works backwards. A manufacturer, of say, school notebooks will approach Hanna-Barbara and ask for the exlusive rights to license Fred Flintstone (or the entire family) onto a notebook or series of notebooks. This is a little more complicated, but is done all the time and is quite lucrative to both firms.
In my case, I started as an unknown writer and cartoonist I was having no luck becoming syndicated yet my naivity kept me from becoming pessimistic. So I approached a number of trade magazines that desperately needed good 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.
Within a few years, I found other manufacturers who made different products than the once I was currently licensing, and was able to negotiate with them using a similar 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.
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.
A decade ago, I launched my business in a broken down tinl warehouse and had less than a hundred cartoons up on a free domain (I couldn't afford a www domain). Now I have 8 websites, 7 e-stores withclose to 80,000 products in about 100 different categories, from tshirts to clocks to aprons, 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.
Did I pay a price? Sure. Anyone does who sets his or her goal high. Was it worth it? I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Article Source: http://www.orbitaloc.com/
Art Director Rick London and his artists has created over 8000 original offbeat cartoon, Londons Times Cartoons Cartooning: Where Is The Money?
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