Alternative titles for this post were ‘Long live the Internet’ or ‘How stupid can you get’.

As a Dutch author writing for the American (and English, Australian and other English-language) market, I’m SASEically challenged. Most markets, especially the professional ones, only accept hardcopy manuscript submission, and require that a self-adressed stamped envelope (SASE) is included for the rejec-… I mean, reply. (And before anyone accuses them of being cheap bastards: the volume of submissions the pro magazines receive would otherwise make reply postage a prohibitive expense.)

American authors (or English, or Australian, depending on the nationality of the market) simply write their address on an envelope, stick a stamp on, and send it along with the manuscript. But foreign contributers have a problem, since they don’t have access to American stamps. In most countries that problem was solved with the introduction of International Reply Coupons. In the Netherlands, unfortunately, IRCs were discontinued by the national postal service for reasons of… well, for no particular reason at all, really.

For a few years now, I’ve been sending my manuscript by electronic means to American Writers of the Future buddy Tom Pendergrass. He’s been acting as a remailing service, printing the stories and sending them to the markets with a SASE provided by him. (We still need to work out a way to reimburse him for his expenses.) But that method is of course a bit of a hassle, though he’s been great in maintaining it’s no effort at all.

So last week a rather obvious idea suddenly jumped into my head: couldn’t I just order American stamps online? And of course, I can. The United States Postal Service has an online store…