... and transatlantic submissions.

First of all, IRCs are awkward to get -- you have to make a special trip to
the post-office to get them.

(And I realise that my previous post in this context was ambiguous -- I was
thinking of myself rather than Árni when I alluded to someone who had
problems in this area.)

Then, how long is their shelf-life?  As an IRC covers the basic cost of
return-postage at the time it's bought, what happens when the postal-rates
change?

And then, just how many IRCs do you include to cover return-postage if what
is being returned weighs more than the bottom-line of an airmail letter with
two sheets of flimsy paper?

The worst-case scenario is sending a submission printed on 90 gm paper and
including a self-addressed envelope, stuffed with enough current IRCs to
cover any eventuality.

(I never got to the point Árni did, of buying or arranging to have sent to
me American postage stamps.  Maybe I should have done.)

To start with, at cross-Atlantic airmail postage rates, this can be
financially ruinous.

Printing on lighter-weight paper to cut down the postal-costs is more
difficult than it looks.  Getting anything lighter than 80 gms today is
difficult -- 60 gms would seem to be suitable, but copy-paper seems to have
vanished along with carbon paper and the typewriter.

The point at which I simply gave-up submitting to American magazines was
after I sent in a set of poems, including a self-addressed airmail envelope,
one IRC, and a covering-note saying not to bother to send the poems
themselves back.

What I received back two months later was the poems I'd sent, reparcelled by
the (British) post-office as, stuffed into a basic airmail envelope, they'd
obviously come-apart in transit.  The rejection-slip (and I inferentially
assumed the poems had been rejected, as every one was returned to me) had
vanished somewhere en route.

After that, <sigh>, swim in your local parochial puddle was what I decided
to do.

I can entirely understand why editors are deeply suspicious of email
submissions (possible viruses, the way in which it's easier to mass-mail
email submissions than it is to do the same with snailmail submissions -- I
could go on ...)

But today, couldn't we have a default whereby snailmail submissions would be
considered, and then accepted or rejected by email?  That way, the problem
of IRCs and SAEs is obviated.

Robin

(The other side of this is that as a "publisher", I wouldn't even remotely
consider the text of a book sent to me in hard-copy.  Well, I'd consider the
text, but I'd expect to end-up *setting* the text from a digital submission.
No OCR, no proofing problems, no pack-drill.

R2)