Patience!
Collecting autographs through the mail is not a good hobby for people with little or no patience. You write a letter to a celebrity, you enclose a photo to be signed, you plop down a ton of postage, you run it out to the mailbox……and then the very next day, some kind of primal urge forces you to blaze back out to your mailbox to see if you have received an autograph back. Never mind the days of transit needed to get the letter out to the celebrity, the days, weeks, or months that your letter will be piled up somewhere in the celebrities office, and the transit days needed to mail your photo back to you. If your autograph does not arrive THE NEXT DAY…you start climbing the walls…..
Patience.
You will encounter the occasional freaks of nature in the celebrity autograph world that will send you an autograph within a week or two after you send a letter. Martin Sheen is a great example. His turnaround time was very quick and I have read many other collector’s comments that also say that Martin is very good about opening his fan mail quickly. (Martin Sheen is the BEST celebrity as far as fan mail is concerned, without a doubt! He is the King!) For every Martin Sheen, you have a star like a John Ratzenberger. John, who played Cliff Clavin on “Cheers”, took a full 6 months to send me a picture. I am not complaining, I am very happy to have gotten an autographed photo from him, no matter the length of time. So far, that 6 month wait has been the longest I have had in my short time in the hobby. My research of the hobby tells me that I am most certain to be getting autographs in the mail, down the road, from people I wrote to a full year or more earlier. I read one collector tell of an autograph that he received almost 3 years after he wrote a request letter.
Patience.
Those letters you wrote last week? You might get autographs back on a few of them within the next week or two. Some you may not get back for months and months. Some, you will never get anything back from.
What I do is I keep a database on my computer of each person I have written to via mail or e-mail. I list the celebrity, the address or e-mail that I used, the date I mailed the letter/e-mail, and what I mailed. When a success comes in, I update the database with the date a photo was received and a description of what I got from the celeb. It is then pretty easy to scan your database and see what letters you have still floating around out there that you have not gotten replies to. As of this exact moment, I have 52 letters and 37 e-mails that I have NOT gotten anything back from. Some of them go back to November of 2008. I will not freak out because you never know when a reply will roll in. If, after 1 year, I have not received anything, maybe I will write to that celebrity again. It won’t hurt to try again.
You never know what 2 different stars are doing at any particular time. Star #1 might be in-between projects and is able to answer his/her fanmail in a quick, timely manner. Star #2 might have just left for Botswana where he/she will be on location for the next 6-8 months filming a movie…meaning the fan mail is going to pile up back at the office….for a loooooooong time.
You never know.
Patience! Don’t let the quick responders fool you into thinking that all celebrities will reply that quickly! And, the response time has NOTHING to do with HOW BIG or POPULAR a star may, or may not, be. I have seen Mega-Famous Stars answer in a few weeks, while Stars that have not been onscreen in decades have taken months to reply.
Good Luck and happy hunting!
