PSA: Fledgling Mailing Costs

[rolanni]

Down in another thread, slash_reader asks the following question:

I live in the UK & am concerned about the postage you will be facing to send my copy. I feel like I made my donation at the time & now you will have to give me back $10-15 of this donation for the postage... I am not so pleased about this.

Is there a way to donate to cover postage costs which won't annoy your tax authorities?

To which I replied:


Thank you for thinking of this.

I went over to the US Post Office site and fed in the information for sending Fledgling to the UK. It would appear that, cheapest, we're looking at $14.20 for one book, which is, frankly, somewhat more than we had budgeted for postage out of the donations*. The post office has been going, er, batshit the last few years with rates, which of course we didn't -- and couldn't -- know in 2007, when this all started. (We have, for the record, seen four postage rate increases since January 2007.)

Because we are freelancers, the IRS considers any money we take in to be taxable -- that's just how it is.

Let me poke around for a couple minutes and see if I can set something up with PayPal. I will make a new post at the top of the journal detailing what I may discover.

Watch the skies!

---
*the accounting for Fledgling and Saltation went like this: 33% off the top for taxes; split the remainder in half, one half to postage and (so we thought at the time) printing, the other half to keeping the authors under roof.
* * *

This message is to note that those who wish to donate money toward postage, may do so by sending an amount they deem appropriate to postageATkorval.com (where AT is replaced by @).

This is not a requirement; we said that we would send those folks who donated $25 or more a signed copy of the book when done, and that we will do. This is an option provided to those folks who, like slash_reader feel that they want to do something more.

Thank you all. We have the Best Fans Ever.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

From http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/content1?catId=5200012&mediaId=27000662

Sending an International Reply Coupon with your mailing means the recipient can reply to you for free or by paying only part of the postage cost. You can buy the coupons from most large Post Office branches for just GBP1.10. Then whoever you send the coupon to can exchange it for international postage at a post office in their own country. They can be used to buy postage for anywhere in the world, not just to reply to the country they have been sent from.

However, I'm not sure from that whether that means that each coupon is only worth GBP1.10 equivalent to the recipient. Or possibly less (if you receive one in the UK you only get 62p worth of stamps, about a dollar's worth). Plus you'd have to pay more for postage to send the things.


They were invented in a time before PayPal, when international postage was at fairly equivalent rates in most civilised countries (i.e. countries where one actually trusted the mail), and when a Pound Sterling was actually worth something useful, and they were expected to be sent with the written order so wouldn't cause extra postage costs. These days PayPal is easier and almost certainly cheaper (and faster) for most people.