From Our Staff | May 07, 2009

Seems like everything costs more these days–a gallon of gas at the BP, tickets to a baseball game at the new Yankee Stadium, mailing your manuscript to The Missouri Review.

That’s right.

New postal rates go into effect Monday, May 11. This means envelopes large and small. When enclosing a SASE for an editor’s response, the stamp for the #10, self-addressed business envelope will cost you 44 cents. And we like, even encourage, you to use the correct amount of postage.

See, while our office tries to cover the additional postage required during these times of rate transitions, we don’t always catch ALL of the envelopes with insufficient postage. Then those same envelopes dribble back to us over the course of several months marked “undeliverable, postage due” or sit as “postage due” unclaimed at your local mail stop. You drop your story or poems or essay in the mail to us, then wait and wait, chew your nails, swear and think how inconsiderate and unresponsive that Speer Morgan is.

We don’t want this to happen to you.

So, if you want to increase the chances that the U.S. Postal Service will actually deliver our editor’s response to your submission, we recommend you use “Forever” stamps on those SASES.

In case you’re interested, here’s the breakdown of the new rates for first-class mail:

Letters – first ounce (3-4 sheets of paper) $0.44
Large envelopes (manuscript-sized) – first ounce $0.88
Additional ounces $0.17
Postcard $0.28