Selling cartoons is hard enough; give yourself a leg up on the competition by playing better odds.
After scouring 10 years of files, databases and Quickbooks reports, here are the cartoons I’ve found sell best:
1. Business Meetings
Put a couple of people in a room with a PowerPoint and you’ve got a great chance at a sale. Here’s the fine print:
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Sales graph cartoons sell especially well (bad sales sell even better).
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Anthropomorphize to stand out from the rest of the submissions.
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White men are boring. Make sure you’re representing all genders and ethnicities.
2. Pets
People love their animals, and a good pet gag is a sure bet.
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Dog cliches abound. Freshen one up and fetch your check.
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Cats are almost too easy to make fun of. Get to it.
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Birds are harder to mine for humor, but they’re a much appreciated palette cleanser for editors.
3. Kids
Whether you play them as innocent, worldly, or just plain silly, kids sell. Try one of these:
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Taking a bath. Water has a lot of comic possibilities.
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Teacher conferences give you lots of options. Study hard.
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Playgrounds are like the standard bar scene for adults; a great place to ponder all sorts of things.
4. Recent Trends
Hard to spot, and a small window of opportunity, but almost a guaranteed sell. Some recent ideas that are almost surely dated by now:
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Twitter
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Going green
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Newspaper decline
5. Holidays
Christmas and Halloween are the champs, but they’re extremely competitive. Break through an editor’s inbox clutter with cartoons about:
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Groundhog Day
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Fourth of July
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St. Patrick’s Day
Of course there’s no guarantee as to what cartoons will sell. A lot depends on what and how much other cartoonists are submitting. But a decade of selling most of the top markets has shown me that the above cartoon topics certainly better your chances.
(BTW, check out my sales cartoons too!)
