Postage per Year

The travails of the U.S. Postal System are well established. As people have moved toward e-mail and other electronic forms of transferring information, they have needed the services of the postal system less and less. I was curious whether my own experience would bear that trend out. 

In my case, however, there are a few things that might mitigate against a decrease in the amount I spend on postage each year. First, I have generally not moved toward using e-payment systems. Second, back in 2008, I decided to make a concerted effort to submit more manuscripts for publication than I had previously been doing. (I used to submit an average of about 20 manuscripts a year; I now submit about 120.) At the same time, however, more of more publications accept electronic submissions, which means that many of those manuscripts don't go through the mail.

So what does the record bear out? In general, despite the rise in manuscript submissions, the amount I spend on postage has, for the most part, gone down most years. At best, I match the postage of the year before I started submitting more.