Hooray! You’ve been granted your first official contract to license your art as greeting cards! This is a very exciting moment for any artist. Kudos to your hard work and persistence paying off! Here are a few things to keep in mind as you move forward that I hope will prove helpful for you and keep the licensing deals coming.
Send clean files. What do I mean by this? Well once you’ve signed your contract, you will then need to send over your high resolution files to the company you signed with. Be sure to send them high quality, high resolution, clean, layered files (layered if possible…I know this is not always an option!). By clean, I mean no extraneous nonsense in the margins, no extra hidden layers nobody needs, no fuzzy dog hairs lurking in the middle of your scans…that type of thing. You want this to feel like a seamless experience for the card publisher when their design team opens your files to prepare them as cards.
Be the artist everyone wants to work with. In addition to sending crisp, clean files, you want to be an amicable partner in this process. Once you’ve handed over your art, you now need to sit back and trust the process. One of the challenges of licensing can be letting go of your babies (your art), but if you’ve trusted this company enough to sign a contract with them, you now must trust that they will do what they know to be best for your art so that it will have the best possible chance of selling. This may mean color changes, layout changes and text added amongst other things. Trust the process. Don’t butt in and try to nit pick. This is a part of licensing. If you are an artist who is easy to work with, you have a better shot of getting licensed again.
In my time running a busy product development team, we sometimes had to pass over super talented artists simply because they didn’t understand this aspect of licensing and didn’t trust us to do our jobs. To be quite blunt, in a fast-paced publishing company, there simply isn’t time to have to nurture artist egos on top of everything else. When you are working with an upstanding company, you must trust that they are always making choices that support their artists AND ensure the best sales for all involved since they know the industry and their customers best. If you’re unable to let go and trust the process, licensing may not be for you!
Continue to add value. Once you’ve handed over the agreed upon artwork, you want to be thinking about what new art you can start creating right away so that you always have new art to show for future releases. Once you’ve already worked with a greeting card publisher and established the business relationship, they would be delighted to be able to get more new artwork from you again. It’s easier than finding more new artists, and if your cards sell well, they will of course want to try out more designs. So make sure you’re ready! Your foot’s already in the door…this is your shot to really build something meaningful. The more cards you can license, the more money you can make and the more impact you can have.
Stay ahead of the curve. A few weeks after you’ve passed along your high res art that’s been licensed, check in and ask the company you’re working with if they can give you a schedule of when they will need future new art throughout the year so that you can be sure to submit future pitches in a timely manner. You don’t want to hound them for dates, so ask once, and if they don’t have a release schedule to provide, then plan to just continue making new art and submitting it to them on a regular schedule (maybe about once a month or once every 2 months). Again, now that you have an established relationship, it becomes much easier to reach out and say “Hi! I know your Christmas release will be in the works soon. Here are some ideas if you’re interested!” This makes their job SO much easier and they will be grateful. Try to get a read on what is coming so you can be prepared with what they’re looking for. You want to be the artist that always comes through with something great so that you remain top of mind for them, but in a helpful not hounding way.
Get excited! Now that you’ve officially licensed your artwork, you will be receiving physical printed production samples of your gorgeous cards in the mail. The day they arrive is always so much fun! Enjoy seeing your hard work pay off! AND I would be remiss if I didn’t mention to enjoy the fruits of your labor in the form of royalty checks. Sit back and enjoy those checks as they start rolling in on a regular basis (but be patient…it sometimes feels like 100 yrs before the first one arrives by the time the whole production process is carried through!). You’ve worked hard, and it’s paying off. Congratulations!!! You are officially in the game :) Now your goal is to try and get as many cards into their line as possible to watch the impact of your art in the world grow (along with your income!).