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Saving Moolah with Media Mail for Manuscripts

Jan 14, 2011   [permalink]

While many markets have thankfully moved to electronic submissions, for those that haven't, here's a money saving tip: Send your manuscripts at the cheaper "Media Mail" postage rate. It's much cheaper than Parcel Post for book manuscripts and First Class rate manuscripts over, say, 15,000 words.

For example, Media Mail is $2.38 for a manuscript envelope weighing 1lb. (or under). If your manuscript weighs 10oz. or more then Media Mail is cheaper. (As of this writing; check here for current rates .) Paper seems to weigh about 6 pages to the oz. 10oz. gets you around 60 pages. At 250 words/page, 10oz gets you maybe a 15,000 word manuscript. So First Class is cheaper under that. Parcel Post starts at $4.90 so that's a no-brainer.

I've seen a number of posts where people have said that you aren't allowed to use Media Mail for manuscripts. Baloney! Here are the USPS pages that specifically state that manuscripts can go via Media Mail:

http://pe.usps.com/text/csr/PS-018.htm
http://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/173.pdf
http://postcalc.usps.gov/PopUps/MediaMail.htm

So if you still have to sling paper around the postal system, at least you can save a buck. Enjoy!

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