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Looking for Additional Writing Markets
Good options are hard to find.
Medium is now the foundation for my earnings as a writer. Still, I’d like to add to that foundation. I have a few other consistent markets. Jerry King and I supply a weekly cartoon to a financial website. We also have cartoons on CartoonStock which is a cartoon warehouse. We receive a monthly payment from them every month for sales of our cartoons.
We also sell cartoons to other outlets. The Saturday Evening Post is one of the more prominent publications that use our cartoons. I’m working on breaking through to other cartoon markets.
I currently have the option of submitting gags to four syndicated cartoon strips. The pay from those markets ranges from $10–$200. Those are all markets I have sold to before and can still try. And yet I haven’t tried them much in recent months. You may wonder why.
I have found almost invariably, the longer you write for syndicated cartoon strips, the more diminished the returns. While the payoff for gags that are accepted is sometimes pretty good, the working relationship usually deteriorates. It’s not that the cartoonists are unpleasant, other factors come into play.
As a gag writer, one of the more irritating aspects of the work is a lack of communication. When you submit gags to a cartoonist, they will sometimes…