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.

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.

Here is the way it works (and there are various ways but these are a few examples). An artist has an idea for a piece of art to put on a company's product. The company likes the art and negotiates a royalty deal in which the artist receives a percentage of all products sold. This can be done from business to business as well. For instance Coca Cola allowing a lunch box maker to put their logo on the lunch boxes. Coke receives a percentage.

When an artist is in negotiation with a manufacturer, it is usually through a licensing agency. They have 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.