Please click the link below and behold my latest creation:
This is a tool for calculating how much an envelope with pages and an SASE weighs. It's for those evenings when you MUST mail something, but the post office is already closed. (In other words, when it's the last day of the month and you're trying to avoid a butt-shredding from McKoala in her Year of Submission challenge.)
To affix proper postage to your envelope, all you need to know is its mass, correct? The Writer's Weigh Scale calculates that for you, because goodness knows a bathroom scale is useless for a fifteen-page story.
Now, here's my dread' secret: I don't have very accurate mass values for the envelopes yet, particularly the non-North American sizes. For that matter, I don't even know if the DL, C5 and C4 envelope sizes are really the most commonly-used ones for people who type on A4-sized paper.
Hence, I have a favour to ask of my UK friends (bats eyelashes at FairyHedgehog and Whirlochre). Could you:
- Let me know which envelope sizes you normally use for story submissions and SASEs? Measurements are fine if you don't know the actual name for that type of envelope.
- If you have access to an accurate scale, could you weigh one (or even better, a stack) of any of these envelopes and tell me the mass(es)? Thank you in advance to anyone who can help me out with this!
I hope you'll find The Writer's Weigh Scale useful. Please feel free to disperse the URL to anyone you think might also find it handy.
And finally, do you have any suggestions for how to make The Writer's Weigh Scale better? When you tried it out, did you discover any glitches? Please let me know of anything you think should be improved, and thank you very much for your help!
3 comments:
This is amazingly brilliant!
I'm happy to go weigh me some envelopes but as I have yet to submit anything I need someone to tell me what size envelopes I need to weigh.
As luck would have it, I've just been to the post office this morning.
We're fortunate in the UK in that all the Royal Mail tariffs for all the various envelopes and parcels are available online, so after a quick calibration c/o my weightlifting cat (she's very accurate), I can hotfoot it to the post office with exactly the right amount of cash. The only drawback is that most of the post offices have been shut down.
But, to answer your questions...
1) A5 envelopes will handle a few sheets of paper, but for a decent UK style sub (1st 3 chapters, covering letter, synopsis etc — 30 sheets for my nov), I use C4 for that extra bit of slack (in much the same way certain wrestlers prefer woolen costumes to lycra). C4 is 324mm x 229mm.
2) My new pack of 10 heavy duty 115gsm manilla C4s weighs in at just over 200g. Two of these, plus 30 sheets of 100gsm paper (ie a submission) weigh roughly 175g.
FairyHedgehog: Thank you for the compliment! It sounds like Whirlochre has the goods on what envelopes to use.
Whirlochre: You are stupendous and amazing! But we already knew that. Thank you so much; that's exactly the information I need.
100 gsm? You use heavy-duty paper!
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