Licensing Expo Recap

It’s been over a week since I returned from the three day international Licensing Expo in Las Vegas and man, it was quite an eye opener.

What is “licensing”? In my case, art licensing is a legal contract between a manufacturer (licensee) and the artist (licensor) to produce specific products for a specific time in a specific area with agreed upon images supplied by the artist. Every time you see Superman on a cereal box, Superman (licensor) made an agreement with that cereal company (licensee) to contract the Superman image on boxes of their sugar bombs.

What does that have to do with Jetlagged Comic? Well, I have been wracking my brain on ways to increase my exposure and get my images onto products at a mass level. Mind blowing to some, I am the only person behind Jetlagged Comic. I write, draw, market, create products, self publish and fly at the same time. Yes, I am a one-woman show. It can be very overwhelming at times, but I don’t want to stop. That’s why I need some help. And that’s why I went to the licensing expo, to see if there was a licensing agency who would contract with me and start creating products.

During my three day visit, I attended the Licensing University within the expo itself. I learned a ton about licensing ranging from how to negotiate contracts to getting ready to legal advice and so on. It was well worth the price of admission. I met some very nice people, drank lots of coffee and walked around for hours each day.

On my last day at the expo, I had an interview with the agency Surge Licensing. A family run agency, I met with son, father and mother in a small back office on the edge of the expo’s massive display booths. In their intimate setting they graciously offered me coffee and snacks while we looked over Jetlagged’s Media Kit I’d prepared ahead of time. Elan, the son, was very excited about what I did and could see lots of potential. His father, Mark, liked the idea too, but was a little less enthusiastic about my sales numbers. And finally Renay, the mother, was extremely sweet and laughed at all the cartoons.

Leaving the meeting I felt very good about the potential of working with them. Time will tell, though. I haven’t yet heard from them, but I assume these things take time and they are doing their due diligence on Jetlagged. I leave it in God hands and go with the flow from now on. If it works out, awesome, if not, there will be a better path down the road.