The Long Tail of Cartooning

I was going back over some old New Yorkers and I came across an article I remembered reading some time back, that I made a mental note to refer to, and clearly promptly forgot that mental note. It was an article about the business model, or philosophy if you prefer, called 'The Long Tail' that Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, wrote about in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.


I've since read a lot more about 'The Long Tail' and how it works in relation to the digital music and the book-selling business. More recently, I have read about it being applied to the DVD movie business, and it strikes me it is the perfect paradigm for the business of cartooning.

How The Long Tail works is best viewed as the opposite of the old video rental shops like Blockbuster. Those shops held very few titles, only the main block-busting movies, the top 20 usually, but lots and lots of copies of them. People popping in looking for an old Will Hay movie like Ask a Policeman, or Cocteau's Orphee, or the Dutch thriller Amsterdamned, were just plain out of luck.

With 'The Long Tail' model however, you can get any movie you want because everything is kept in stock, forever - everything, even the most obscure titles that shift only 1 copy in 5 years.

As you will have guessed then, the old fashioned concept of a shop is not ideally placed to adopt the Long Tail, even with enormous floorspace a traditional business all on its own, is not ideally placed to profit from this business approach (although it is easy to imagine a group of small shops working together, with a central warehousing facility pulling it off). On the other hand virtual businesses, that is to say businesses that can keep their stock as pieces of data, for instance those that supply digital songs or ebooks or emagazines or, even, cartoons and illustrations, are immediately ideally placed to profit from it.

With these e-businesses, the warehouse space needed for the items they produce, or store, is incredibly small, and measured in bits and bytes. They can keep a million copies of their number one best seller, by simply having one copy of it on a server, and it takes up just exactly the same amount of space as the obscure item that sells only once every 6 years. The appeal and the beauty of The Long Tail, in this respect, is that because of the way the work is stored, it also incorporates the old 'block-busting' philosophy as well, because endless copies of the top 20 best sellers are still available for anyone and everyone who still just wants those, and the buyer interested in something older and more obscure can also get what they want. It's a win/win situation.

I started thinking about The Long Tail in relation to the cartooning business when cartoonist Anthony Kelly was pondering the question of resending cartoons that failed to be bought on their first outing, or two; or ever for that matter. It's relevant to The Long Tail business model because these days we cartoonists scan all our drawings into the computer and over time develop a large database of digital work, that can long outlast the original drawings. Indeed many cartoonists no longer draw on paper, and draw directly into the computer and in both these cases the 'original' paper drawing becomes less useful than their digital clone, which can from then on be printed out endlessly as a high-resolution copy, or sent to publishers by email.

These high-resolution copies can quickly build up in number because cartooning is a high-volume business, so for that reason, and in case the computer's hard drive takes a nose-dive, many cartoonists store their accumulated work on a removable hard drive, flash drives, or burn them to disc. Either way, most cartoonists, essentially, build an archived Long Tail of our own cartoons. Which should be, with luck, categorised in a way that makes a cartoon on a given subject easily accessible.

Of course, without knowing they are doing so, many cartoonists and illustrators have been practising the Long Tail for years. I myself have, on more than one occasion, looked through my database of cartoons to see if any can be reused or adapted because some trend or fashion or major event has swung round again. I do it in August, when I get my cartoons ready for Christmas, and I do it every time I get a commission - no sense in wasting a good idea. It's actually a fairly common practise amongst cartoonists, and my colleague and chum, Mike Lynch has, in the past, written about how long it has taken to place a particular cartoon; proving that cartoons that are returned are never 'rejects', they are just under appreciated at that time. In short, they are ideal candidates for the Long Tail.

Back when I abandoned the UK market and started sending my cartoons to the US, along with the new stuff I sent some cartoons that hadn't sold in the UK - and quite a few were picked up by some major US titles (and yes that was very, very, satisfying). I suppose, like most of my colleagues, I just wasn't ever aware that I was practising a sound and recognised business model, experience had simply taught me that if I persisted and sent the drawings to enough titles, that I would eventually sell almost every cartoon. The 'rule' that cartoonists sell only 10 to 20% of the work they produce is only true when they are attempting to sell that batch of cartoons that month, to a small selection of preferred markets. Given the luxury of time, they will all sell, it's just a matter of the thing arriving in the right place, at exactly the right time - for instance when a magazine is producing a Special Edition that the cartoon relates to.

When you sit down and think about it, the Cartoon Stock Agencies, which a lot of cartoonists maintain they only send their old cartoons that failed to sell to, actually already operate The Long Tail model. To be sure, some of the cartoons they sell are contemporary, the 'block-busters' of the cartooning world if you will, but they are a minority, they mainly sell generic cartoons to companies or individuals or schools and colleges, from a large data bank of themed cartoons. When, for instance, the Society of Dentists is looking for 12 dentist-themed cartoons to print on a calender for its members, it isn't bothered how old the cartoons are, it doesn't care if a cartoon was created 15 years ago or last week, and doesn't really care who drew the cartoons, the good society's criteria will be 'dentist-themed' and funny.

Looking at it from a safe distance, you can see that it is the cartoonists themselves who are operating The Long Tail, but rather than selling the work themselves they have chosen to supply a middleman to operate the Long Tail on their behalf. This is not cheap, the Stock Agencies routinely take 50% of the sale, in commission, which is a lot of money for simply storing the work online. When you think about it, the Stock Agency website is in fact nothing more than a convenient storefront that displays a variety of old and new cartoons on a range of themes.

The thing is, these Stock Agencies prove, by their very existence, that a demand exists for a Long Tail of cartoons, on a variety of subjects; so why then, since each cartoon a cartoonist sells herself rather than selling through a Stock Agency will net the cartoonist 100% of the sale (and the payment will arrive a lot sooner), do so few cartoonists set up their own data bank of their own cartoon stock online?

It's a puzzle. Perhaps cartoonists are too busy or too unskilled in http to set the thing up, or too poor to pay anyone else to do so, or just too timid to try the open-source software that is available (but admittedly is very intimidating). Or perhaps they suspect, or fear, that they will not attract the passing trade, on their own. A fear they should disregard if our example of the dentist-themed cartoons is in anyway accurate. Remember our dentists really don't care who created the dentist-themed cartoons, as long as they are funny. If the lone cartoonist can provide all the cartoons in print-ready form, or even produce the actual calender, so much the better. All these people don't want to do is to have to hunt around the www and gather a bunch of disparate cartoons, in various formats, from different desperate cartoonists. What swings it for them, is the one-stop shop - a cartooning Wal-Mart.

For me, even lumping all these reasons for not giving it a go yourself together, hardly seems reason enough not to try, and it begs the question, why don't some cartoonists solve all those possible problems by banding together to set up their own small Stock Agency, or small syndicate, sharing the work, worry, jobs, and expenses involved?

That was the question I was left asking myself when I heard from 2 cartoonists who had sold about 5 cartoons, between them, through Stock Agencies, over a period of 2 years - for a very small amount of money. It intrigued me more when I realised the cartoons they had sold were all business cartoons. Had it occurred to them, I wondered, that if they got together and set up a website advertising their skills and experience, and their stock of business--related cartoons, that there was at least a chance that they could have sold the same cartoons to the same customers who were on the Internet searching for business cartoons - and for twice as much money as they had been paid? And had it occurred to them that if the people buying those business-related cartoons had just bought a quota of business cartoons from the Stock Agency, in the same way our fictitious Society of Dentists bought a hypothetical bunch of dental-themed cartoons, that they might have bought all the business-themed cartoons they were looking for from their own archives, rather than from the Stock Agency archive. Think about it, that one sale to you might have represented a sale of 10 or 20 or even 100 business-related cartoons to the Stock Agency. It is, after all, as it will make clear to you, not acting as your Agent. It is not there to try to sell 100 cartoons by you, it is there to move 100 units of 'cartoon stock'.

It seems clear to me that a very small, manageable, Stock Agency, with a handful of partner- cartoonists, all with a proven record of publication, perhaps specialising in business and office humour (which can be a broad sweep), or golfing humour, or IT humour, et al, could expect to meet with a reasonable degree of success, even if they charged slightly more for their cartoons than some of the other agencies out there.

I can even imagine a loose umbrella sort of arrangement where you have, for instance, two cartoonists who sell their work online, lets say Randy Glasbergen and Mark Anderson for example, both cartoonists who create business-related cartoons for The Harvard Business Review. They will still have their own individual sites, but they could also have an umbrella site, that sells their work together, as 'Business Cartoons by Harvard Business Review Cartoonists', and perhaps even prints the calenders and cards and other paraphernalia for the customer.

In the UK, I can easily imagine the same sort of umbrella site pulling together a vast array of talents including Tony Kelly himself, and when you add a few others to the mix, you end up with a graphic design workforce that can proclaim itself 'Britain's Best Cartoonists' and is capable of designing everything from caricatures to calenders, books, and even Flash movies for the web MOBS and TV.

Things have never looked so bad on the traditional front for cartoonists, and yet so exciting in so many new areas. But we will throw it all away if we keep putting our destiny in the hands of others. The Long Tail approach affords us an opportunity, at very little cost, that we must grasp.

Postscript: I have just stumbled accross a very good looking site that a young (I'm presuming) UK 'cartoonist' is selling his wares from. He is appallingly bad, and that the only thing remotely to his credit is that he is not claiming to ever have had a cartoon published anywhere.

What he is claiming to be is a 'professional cartoonist' and I suppose that in one sense he is just that. What is a;arming to me though, is that anyone limiting themselves to a search on Google, for cartoonists in the UK only, will find his site quite quickly, and they will either buy cartoons from him - or move immediatly to a cartoon stock agency for a more professional selection. That could well put this particular buyer off buying from individual cartoonists.