The Writers Guide to Shipping and Postage

As a writer, handling your own shipping and postage can sometimes be cumbersome. Trying to gather all of the materials such as boxes, tape and filler material can be quite expensive. Plus you have to go to the post office and stand in line to wait for the next teller to weigh each of your packages and list shipping service options on each of them. It can take up a lot of your time and gets tiresome pretty quickly.

There is a solution that will save you both time and money. The United States Post Office offers boxes, tape and shipping labels for Priority Mail shipments at no cost and USPS even includes free shipping for your order. You can register for an account to order all of the shipping supplies that you will need.

Another option to make shipping easier is a company called Stamps.com which allows you to print shipping labels from the comfort of your own home. Here you can download a complete postal service program to install on your computer so that you have the ability to print out your own postage. It also offers a free digital scale to weigh your packages, free delivery confirmation and free shipping supplies such as boxes and tape. The company also offers discounted insurance rates and the ability to hide the postage cost that is usually printed on the label. This feature comes in handy for sellers who charge fixed shipping rates when the cost of shipping is much lower than the actual price paid. Stamps.com also offers the ability to print all classes of mail such as Priority, First Class, Parcel Post, Media Mail, Express Mail and International Mail. Although they charge a low monthly fee to use this program, it is well worth it. Stamps.com even offers a free trial for a month so you can try it out for yourself without the risk of losing any money.

Consider private shipping companies like FedEx for mailing manuscripts. This company offers flat rate boxes, sized appropriately. You can also set up an account on-line, which allows access to tracking your precious cargo and allows to take caring of your billing electronically.

If you are selling self-published books via Ebay, shipping and postage just got easier with Paypal’s integrated postage label system. Pay-pal does not charge a fee for this service. It includes free Delivery Confirmation on all Priority postage purchases. You can choose many different shipping rates including Priority, First Class, Media Mail, Parcel Post and Express Mail. Although this service does not include a free postage scale, the ability to print postage to your home printer from your Ebay and Pay-pal user interfaces is priceless. When you print out postage from either Ebay or Pay-pal, the system automatically recognizes that you have done this and changes the status of your Ebay item to “shipped”.

The best thing about purchasing postage and printing it at your home is that you can drop off all of your packages into any USPS mailbox without having to stand in line.