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Even though I had hours of academic marketing classes, and cartoonist Rick London, my former boss had none, his killer marketing instincts could have rewritten the textbooks. He is no guru, in fact, is anti-guru. He doesn't write ebooks or exploit those who know less. He tells it like it is. He approached cartooning knowing nothing about the business. He learned it as he went. Rick had a good bit of experience in corporate America before starting. He was keenly aware that most professions had trade magazines and this was virtually an untapped market. Most were low budgeted and could not afford an inhouse cartoonist, and were willing to pay a small amount for a monthly or quarterly cartoon. Rick provided it. He made a hundred calls a day to publishers. Out of that hundred, he would generally sell one or two cartoons. He was building a portfolio and enough money to keep the lights on. Since Rick was living hand-to-mouth at the time, if the answer was "no, we don't have the budget" which it often was, Rick would offer the cartoon as a barter for a product or service to run the cartoon in their catalogs, websites, or other publications. This worked at least 50% of the time, and Rick was able to barter the cartoon images for everything from fishing tackle to food. Food was his main goal at the start because at times, he was not eating, simply working day and night. Until this day, he has a four year running barter with one natural food company where he receives a huge box of natural food and vitamins in trade for a single black and white cartoon that is published on their hard copy mail-out catalog It was a cold winter in 1997. Rick was living and working from an abandoned Mississippi warehouse. He was not eating well but had made some good trades with fishing tackle companies to put his fishing-related cartoons on their sites. He took the tackle and lures (sometimes live bait he dug up from the woods) and would fish after working in the late afternoon, sometimes into the night until he had enough fish to make a meal. This man knew how to survive. It was like living and working on Walden Pond. Today, though he still does an occasional barter, it is not because he has to, but because he wants to. Generally, he is approached now by publishers worldwide, even of academic textbooks for usage of cartoons for cash, not barter. The Internet had not yet evolved into what it is today when Rick started. Yahoo! was about the only "goodie" on the web. There were blogs but they were known as bulletin boards and rarely used for any marketing purposes. Rick had to use the phone most the time to make his deals and get his name known. He couldn't google anything because there was no Google. All he had at the start was a free domain website (he couldn't afford a www) and about fifty cartoons. I knew this hard-working man would make it; I had no idea he would be at the top in ten years. He is. I am hard-pressed to find someone who is so committed to a project. A day does not go by that he does not do some article marketing, blogging, revamping his ppc campaign, and even finds time to write new cartoons. At age fifty-three, his mind is sharper than a teenager, and that is not an embellishment. It is almost a phenomena. Though he is from Mississippi originally (where I met him), he is not from that part of Mississippi that is known to produce such genius; the delta which brought us William Faulkner, Elvis, Grisham, Willie Morris, Morgan Freeman, B.B. King, Eudora Welty, and others. Though Ms. is not known for its education, it is usually last of the fifty states, it still produces some genius. I brushed shoulders with one. I do not see him anymore but communicate via email. He is sharp as ever and bubbling with enthusiasm. He loves his work and does it so well. I remember him not being understood there. Some thought he was a bit too eccentric. He was not. He was regular marketing "wiz kid" that just happened to be interested in a not so "status quo" product, cartooning and humor gifts. He is by far, to me, the funniest cartoonist who ever lived, and I always give his products from his stores as gifts on any occasion. It's been almost a decade since I've seen Rick. I would love to spend just one evening with him picking his brain now.
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Rick London has the largest offbeat cartoon site on the Internet and several cartoon gifts and collectibles Rick London's Marketing Secret: From Nothing To Internet's Top Cartoonist And E-Tailer, and
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