Sell Your Cartoons To Magazines

By Ron Coleman

With the digital revolution, many magazines have gone out of business or converted to online publications.
Still, for the magazine cartoonist, there may be more opportunities than ever to sell their cartoons to magazines.
In this book a cartoonist who has been selling his work to magazines for over 50 years discusses the market for magazine cartoons today, how to find markets and submit your work, how to price your cartoons, how to write funny salable gags, business matters and other places to sell your cartoons besides magazines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Coleman
• Release date: Apr 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311477194

Ron Coleman

I have been a freelance cartoonist part-time for about 50 years, having sold my first cartoon while in the eighth grade. Since that time my work has appeared in hundreds of magazines, newsletters, newspapers and online. My most notable sales were to Saturday Evening Post, Official Detective, Medical Economics, and Hustler Humor. My day jobs consisted of working for movie studios in Los Angeles including Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Orion Pictures and Walt Disney Studios. My work in these studios was mostly in the areas of payroll, publicity and advertising. I am now retired but remain active in cartooning. I live in Oakridge, Oregon with my wife.

Book preview

Index

Introduction

The Market Today

Your Qualifications

Finding Markets

How to Submit Your Work

How to Price Your Cartoons

How to Write Funny Gags

Business Matters

Other Places to Sell Your Cartoons

Final Thoughts

Introduction

When I was in the seventh grade I saw an ad in Popular Mechanics magazine which read, Make Big Money Drawing Simple Cartoons. They were offering a free book which I immediately sent for. It was from a place called Cartoonists Exchange and they were selling a correspondence course in cartooning and commercial art. I remember their asking price was $50, which was a fortune to me at that time. But I had a paper route and made a few dollars per week and this school offered to take installment payments of $3 per month. I needed my parents’ permission. My mother was against it. She thought it was just a scam to take my money. But my dad said he thought any education was good, so he convinced her to go along with it. They signed for me and I enrolled in the course.

What I have learned over the years is that, for the most part, there is not any big money in cartooning, nor are the cartoons all that simple to produce. I finished the course in a year, then proceeded to submit my work. It was another year before I sold my first cartoon to Optical Journal-Review. I was 17 years old at the time. Here is my first cartoon sale:

Since that time I have sold hundreds of cartoons to magazines and trade journals, mostly small publications with very specialized slants. My biggest sales were probably to The Saturday Evening Post, Chicken Soup for The Soul, and Medical Economics.

Cartooning was always a part-time pursuit for me and I spent most of my adult life in clerical jobs