Sunday Mailbag- Finding Work?

Q: In what avenues do you pick up freelance work? Do you have an agent, or just general social/web presence and word of mouth recommendations? Or do clients seek you out from your work at MAD?

A: I have never had a “rep”, which is what illustrators call their agents. I’ve never been averse to having a rep, I’ve just never found myself hooked up with one. I have twice approached reps to see if they would be interested in working with me. One was a local Twin Cities rep whose name I cannot remember, but I think she was suggested to me by another local artist I knew. We met for lunch at a local eatery and she gave me a polite “no thank you”. This was many years ago just before I started with MAD. A few years ago MAD cover illustrator extraordinaire Mark Fredrickson urged me to submit my work to the mega rep agency Gerald & Cullen Rapp. I contacted them but they never even looked at my work, saying they said they had no interest in other artists.

Frankly I’ve never really missed not having a rep. I have been lucky to keep getting steady work via other channels, and I don’t have to give a percentage of my fees to an agent that way. The benefits of a rep are that they pursue and secure work for you, and they negotiate your fees. If you have a good rep, they work hard going out and finding you good jobs, and they negotiate higher fees so at the end of the day you are happy to pay them their agent percentage. If you have a bad rep, they just pay for a percentage of a page in an illustration sourcebook, sit around waiting for their phone to ring rather than going out to find you jobs, and expect all your jobs to go through them even if they are from clients you secured yourself, so they can collect their percentage from those jobs as well.

Speaking of sourcebooks, I used to advertise with illustration sourcebooks like the Directory of Illustration, but I find that they are a lot less effective these days. I am not sure that art directors use printed directories anymore. For many years I spent money on a page or a spread in the DoI and it usually netted me several jobs a year, one or two of which would become regular clients. That was well worth the advertising costs. In latter years I stopped getting enough work from those ads so that they paid for themselves, and thus I stopped doing them.

My last paid solicitation for work was through the online “iSpot” illustration directory. Again I reached a point where I was not getting enough jobs from my presence in the iSpot to justify the cost. I stopped with the iSpot last year.

To be fair the drying up of jobs obtained through these avenues may have had as much or more to do with my work just not appealing to the art directors frequenting these sources as the sources themselves not being as effective. Either way continuing with them didn’t make much sense for me.

Most of my illustration work has always come from word of mouth and from art directors I’ve worked with in the past recommending me. I have also ramped up my social media presence especially via Instagram and have gotten several clients directly from there.

Any yes, there is (or was) a “MAD effect” with work coming from clients who saw me in MAD and reached out as a result. I’ve done many one-off jobs as a result of that, like the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” projects I did last year, and I’ve even gotten some long term clients like Jeff Dunham thanks to my MAD work.

As any freelancer knows, finding new clients and jobs is as important as the work you do for those clients. Finding the most effective ways to get your work in front of those potential clients is a constant goal.

Thanks to Hoosier574 (via Reddit) for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!