International Mailings: A tutorial

My international postage finally came... sort of.

Unfortunately the place I bought my stamps through didn't tell me that they ran out of several of the stamps I needed. They didn't charge me for them, but it would have been nice to know and I would have bought some different ones. So, my mailings to Italy (Roberto Baggio), Croatia (Damir Haramina), Slovenia (Bobo Lucic), and South Africa (David Byrne) won't be happening just yet.

But now, a little info on how to do this most effectively.

With soccer being the most international of all the sports played in the US, collecting soccer autographs may involve a lot of mailing around the world. While it's true that all of the Big Four have had international players as well (MLB has plenty from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia; the NFL once in a while has a few European and Central Americans, usually kickers; the NBA had over 100 foreign-born players on active rosters at the start of the 2014-15 season; and the NHL is nearly one-third European), none of those sports are played anywhere near as much as soccer worldwide.

With my MISL project, a significant portion of the players in the sets were foreign-born (just looking at a random roster to give you an idea, the 1990-91 Cleveland Crunch had 24 players; 13 of them were born outside the USA and eight had citizenship only in a European country-- two had dual citizenship and three were Canada-only). Many gained citizenship and stayed in the United States after their playing careers, but a handful did return home.

The toughest part of mailing out autograph requests internationally is getting the proper return postage. American stamps won't typically do you any good in getting it back. I've had success with them before, but I wouldn't recommend it. And International Reply Coupons are expensive and hard to come by.

Once you have an address, you then know where to send, and postage to get your letter over to the player is the easy part-- right now it's $1.15 to mail a standard one ounce letter internationally (one ounce is approximately a SASE, a letter, and up to about 8 cards, so you should be good to go on most players). The USPS sells International Forever stamps that cover the cost even with future rate increases.  Unfortunately my local PO doesn't always have them. On the positive side, standard first-class stamps are 47 cents, and a two-ounce stamp is 68 cents.  What happens when you put those together? Bam, $1.15. So that's what I did. Unfortunately the only two-ouncers they had in stock were wedding themed. Great...

Knowing the price of a return stamp can be tricky as it varies from country to country. Not only because of differences in monetary exchange rates, but also due to different prices post-exchange. Just because it costs $1.15 to mail a letter internationally here in the US doesn't mean it'll cost €1.05 to mail from anywhere in Europe, or £0.95 from the UK, ¥118.94 from Japan, or 10.17kr from Sweden.

Most countries' postal websites could tell you this info. But unless you're semi-fluent in a few languages, you may be sunk as translations are not always available, and even Google Translate isn't always the best.

Fortunately, there is a site that lists mailing rates from every country-- their domestic rates AND their international rates AND an approximate cost conversion. So you can find out that it costs 60 Lek to mail from Albania, and that a US dollar is approximately 104 Lek: so it's about 60 cents. Meanwhile, it's 50 Argentinian pesos to mail from Argentina to the US-- nearly $4!

For the MISL sets, that means I'm mailing to...
UK - £1.05
Croatia - 13 Kuna
Serbia - 70 Dinar
Netherlands - €1.25
Argentina - 50 pesos
South Africa - 6.60 Rand
Slovenia - €1.26
Bosnia-Herzegovina - 2.15 BAM
Canada - C$1.25
Denmark - 30 Krone

So once you have it all set as to what cost you need to cover, the next step obviously is buying stamps. K4HB recommends a guy named Bill Plum, who can be contacted via an email address listed on their site. I didn't notice that until just now. Herrick Stamp Company is who I used. You may have to pay a bit of a premium, but once you realize that you are not getting charged much for shipping, not having to deal with multiple exchange rates, not having to buy a ton of extra stamps that you don't need, not having navigate a bunch of websites in multiple languages, and not having to wait different amounts of time for them all to get to you, it's not that bad to pay a little more. My only wish is that I had been told they were out of a few I needed. I would have gladly bought some different ones. I may give Mr. Plum a try next time.

So from there, just put your American postage on the outgoing envelope, the appropriate foreign postage on the return envelope, and then just treat it like any other TTM request. Make sure to put USA at the bottom of your address on your return envelope.

If you don't want to bother with international stamps, you can always toss in a couple dollars to cover postage. It's worked for me before (some have even sent back my cash), but I prefer making it as easy on the other person as possible. I once heard of a baseball player writing an angry note back to someone for enclosing cash instead of stamps on a ball, basically saying he doesn't have time to go stand in line at the post office and that he was never signing again; and so far he hasn't. So, I don't want to be That Guy.

We'll see how this goes. I had success with my Netherlands and Canada requests (except one), all of which had postage rather than cash, and I've had decent success with hockey requests across borders, so I have high hopes for these as well.