Autograph Collecting: Research and Writing

The first tip is research: you need to know some basic information about the person whose autograph you are requesting. Presumably, the people you want to write too you will already know a lot about, but it may occur you just want to enlarge your collection, or there's someone who has just come on the scene and will be a big star, and you know little about them. Whatever the case, you need information.

So where do you get it, and how much? Well, the best thing to do is probably to ask your friends, to see if they can help you out, or failing that, you can search for the person(s) in questions via search engines, and visit fan sites. You could try posting to relevant autograph-collecting newsgroups. It needn't be a hit-and-miss case though, as there are resources available to help you.

If it comes down to it, you could even visit your library and see if the persons listed in 'Who's Who!'. The Movie Database could help you writing to a Movie star: it gives biographical information and other key facts about the actor/actress whose details you request. The address is http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/ and should be of use to you.

Now, how much research should you do: well, there's no need to spend ages learning every detail: for a start, you'll never fit them into a letter of one page's length (never longer: they don't get read normally, so there's no point). Incidentally, if sending an e-mail, then again don't make it too long, since the same as the above applies. Also, whilst it may seem a good idea to use a background and all different colours etc., and sending it in HTML format, this is not recommended: not all e-mail clients will support HTML attachments and sending a background image takes longer to download: you want what you send to be read so, in this instance, plain text is your best bet.

Returning to how much research you should do, whilst there is no point in doing exhaustive research, if you just know the name of one movie that a movie star's been in and nothing else about them, this is not enough. You need to know a little bit about their careers; because you need to be able to make some relevant or original comment about the person, so that they feel you really want their autograph

For more detailed autograph collecting advice, read these articles: