Try Negotiating First Publication Rights
By Ron Coleman
Although many publishers will accept cartoons that have been previously published, some require first publication rights before they will consider your work. In some cases this can be a problem.
For example, if your cartoon is of a very timely nature, it cuts down the window of opportunity for you to make a sale.
Suppose it is October and you have a great idea for a Christmas cartoon. Some publications need a lead time of a couple of months in order to publish a cartoon once they buy it. Some publications will wait a couple of months before deciding whether or not to buy your cartoon. So, if you submit a cartoon in October and it gets rejected in December, it's too late to submit it to another market until next year.
Then there are some publishers who won't give you an answer at all, unless they decide to buy the cartoon. So you could wait for months without knowing if you sold it or not.
You could submit it to several markets at once and if one buys it, immediately let the others know it is no longer available for first publication rights. But many of these markets also don't like simultaneous submissions.
I have run into publishers who ask for first publication rights but agreed to consider previously published cartoons. The main thing is to be completely transparent with these markets who request first publication rights. If I decide to submit simultaneously I will inform them in a cover letter.
Here is something else I've tried which so far has not worked, but I think it could. If a cartoon is particularly timely, and there simply isn't time to submit it several places, I will do a simultaneous submission, inform them in a cover letter that I am doing so, and say that I will award first publication rights to either the first offer I receive or to the best offer I receive. I actually invite them to bid on those first publication rights. Most publishers will probably balk at this idea, but if every cartoonist did it, they would soon have to start considering it.
I remember when I first got on the internet and I would submit cartoons by email, most publishers told me they would only accept submissions by regular mail. That's how they had always done it and they were not receptive to change. But, in time, as more cartoonists submitted this way, they began to come around. Soon these publishers started to realize how convenient this was for everyone, and now most publishers actually prefer email submissions.
I generally don't offer first publication rights to a publisher unless they pay $100 or more. But I know of at least one market that only pays $20, yet they are asking for first publication rights. I might agree to that if my cartoon has been rejected everywhere else before I submit to them. One thing I won't do is sell ALL RIGHTS exclusively to any magazine. In the long run the rights have to belong to me.
I can't help but believe that most publishers want to be fair to cartoonists and they will at least consider negotiating on their positions as far as the rights they are buying. If they won't consider it, there are other magazines you can try.