Art Licensing: The Real Money In Cartooning
Rick London
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.
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.
When an artist is in negotiation with a manufacturer, it is usually through a licensing agency. They have 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.
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.
Though my cartoons have now been published numerous times in newspapers and magazines worldwide, I am yet to be syndicated, yet the traditional old way (before the Internet) was to become syndicated first, then manufactured for licensing. The days of old are over.
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.
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.
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.
Cartoonist Rick London and his artists has created over Over Eight Thousand Cartoons original offbeat cartoon, Londons Times Cartoons
http://www.londonstimes.us) Cartooning: Where Is The Money?
