The joy and agony of a snail mail newsletter

A handwritten letter is a collection of smudges and smells. A thing held by human hands, maybe perfumed, maybe dirty, that inked a name and address in dried woodpulp before walking it to the mailbox. When it arrives, “I always think about the fact that you have to use both hands to open it. That sounds so stupid, but you quite literally have to put your phone down and open this thing," 26-year-old Hannah Gustafson says of her snail mail club, Tiny Post.

Of course, just about the only way to find a snail mail club today is to pick up your phone and enter your credit card information. There are hundreds of thousands of posts across TikTok and Instagram tagged #snailmail. Clubs run ads for their subscriptions and offer paid consultations on starting your own. CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider have all published articles in the past few months about how various luddites of correspondence and community make thousands of dollars per month selling subscriptions.

The big clubs probably aren’t long for this world. But the humble, cozy clubs, the ones run by senders who prioritize connection over cash, those are antifragile. “I feel like it’s nice just having a small group and keeping it intimate and not having it just be another mass-produced thing to send out,” Sarah Wormann of Buildings Around the World explained in an interview. “That kind of loses some of the magic of it for me.” There’s not much more to it than that, really. Keep the smudges and smells, and make the rest up as you go along.

A snail mail newsletter can be whatever you want it to be

The whole reason to start sending physical artifacts to subscribers is to build deeper relationships. Correspondence beyond screens. You don’t get that by starting from a template, kit, or soulless checklist. All you need to know is what you want to send and how often you want to send it. Everything will follow naturally from those two decisions.

The snail mail meta skews heavily toward letters, zines, stickers, and postcard-sized art. But anything that you can afford to mail works. Kaelyn Marie’s Swatched Ink Print Club* *sends a fabric swatch and a stitch card with sewing instructions printed on it. Others send enamel pins, laser-engraved wooden trinkets, or risograph zines. “Nothing forces you to really *believe *in a piece of writing like spending four hours printing 40 copies of it,” Catherine Swanner explained in her newsletter, process notes.

You might send subscribers a totem once a month, a quarter, or maybe just once a year. And that snail mail might stand on its own, or be accompanied by an email newsletter. Destiny Toro’s Borikén Mail Club, for example, includes “mail sent with anshi (love) from Puerto Rico to your home at the end of every quarter (March, June, September, December),” alongside a “monthly newsletter with secret member content and 1-2 exclusive emails each month.”

Another approach is to send snail mail to your premium subscribers, then release digital versions of that text or art later for regular subscribers. Or, flip that the other way around like Anne Friedman did with her zine Women Texting. When we emailed her to ask about it, she replied that “I had published these essays originally as a serial in my weekly newsletter while I was on maternity leave, and a few readers had requested them in a collected format…the zine is the only way to read these essays if you didn't save them in your inbox.”

Part of what makes snail mail clubs so seductive is they are extraordinarily low-risk. Create something, sell it, and ship it. If it becomes too overwhelming or draining, fulfill your current orders and let everyone know why you’re moving on. You can essentially operate, costs-wise, month-to-month with little to no long-term production expenses. And, with the right approach, you’ll find that writing a newsletter, print or digital, is actually incredibly rewarding.

When we asked long-time ziner Dan Sinker about the value of translating a year’s worth of articles into They Can't Take Us All, he said that “reading back over everything, thinking about how it could fit together, typesetting it, all that, it deepened my relationship with the writing.” All told, a well designed snail mail subscription can give fans more access to your work, create a financial safety net for your art, and push you to hone your craft in new ways. If you’re not careful, however, all of that can end up being a gilded cage.

How to destroy a snail mail club

Bo Natahkin’s couch is crammed sideways down his hallway, replaced by stacks of printed cookbooks that he sends every month and other production equipment. “I don’t think I have an apartment anymore. It’s more like a warehouse or studio,” he told CNBC earlier this year. Because behind every story of a crossing guard making $14k per month selling printed stories and stickers, there is the reality that you either have to spend dozens of hours stuffing envelopes, or sacrifice your smudges and smells for something with a little less soul.

“A mail club is 20% design and creativity, 80% physical labour. In the beginning, this ritual of packing and sealing envelopes was beautiful, even meditative, in its repetitive nature. I’d play Gilmore Girls reruns and fall into a flow state,” Martina Calvi recalled in her post Why I closed my mail club. As she crossed the 1,000 subscriber mark, though, she and her family could no longer manage printing and packing boxes themselves. Martina had to find a third-party logistics partner, which not only tripled costs but also meant “packages were assembled robotically, sometimes carelessly, and without intention. They weren’t packed with love anymore, and as silly or sentimental as it might sound, I think my community could feel it.”

It can be hard to walk away from the money and adoration a successful snail club generates. “It was a terrifying decision to cancel my most popular ‘product’ and financial stream. But a year later, I am just as confident in my decision,” Calvi said. “I‘ve learned that what I create is not for everyone, and I don’t want it to be.”

Setting a subscription ceiling before you launch a snail mail subscription is a good start. As is running a small pilot program with an inner circle of hand-selected subscribers before offering it to everyone. Even something as simple as picking the right paper can take four or five times longer than you expected. It may take several sends before you run into half of your eventual surprises and struggles, so give yourself way more lead time than you expected. Almost everyone says their club expenses ended up being far higher than they had estimated.

If you’re mailing something that won’t fit in a regular envelope, visit your local post office and ask as many questions as you can think of before promising a package to anyone. Kiki Klassen of Lucky Duck Mail Club recommends making friends at your local post office. “I know all the ladies there by name, and they know me. Sometimes they even help me put stamps on.” Stamps and envelopes will be one of the biggest cost centers when estimating your total inputs.

For zines, specifically, “Make sure your book includes your name, contact info, the date, and location of publication, and the price (the cost to you per book x3, minimum),” Julia Gfrörer insisted in Analog Self Publishing. Accounts for every single expense you can think of: postage, materials, your time, mistakes, misprints, damaged mail, stamp-related carpal tunnel, therapy, everything. Or, for something simpler, simply give premium subscribers heavy discounts on physical items in your online store. Anne Friedman used a print-on-demand service called MagCloud, for example. “I wasn't sure how many copies I'd sell and I didn't have the capacity to do fulfillment.”

The most important thing is that you commit to a price, schedule, and finished product that makes you more happy than wealthy. I feel lucky to live and work in a time when a certain subset of people are swinging back toward physical art and communication with a new appreciation for what living without it feels like. It may not last and I don’t want to waste it chasing growth at all costs.

Find them online to befriend them offline

The history of zines looks, to me, like a giant middle finger to the publishing model that existed at the time. Zines were a way for punks and writers and artists and activists and a thousand others to spread opinions that differed from those of newspapers and primetime news. Snail mail clubs feel like the same thing but for tech. What once felt like a place where everyone had a voice once again feels like pay-to-play.

While email alleviates most of the problems of The Feed, creators like Destiny Toro realize that there can be “a huge contradiction for me in newsletters, where I know both that our inboxes are overflowing with emails and that email remains a more solid way to stay in touch with our communities than social media.” For her, working snail mail into the mix grounds subscriber relationships in something meaningful and tactile.

Nothing beats a walk to the mailbox to find the unexpected smudges and smells of paper from halfway across the globe. "The act of writing a letter or painting a picture, packaging in an envelope, placing a stamp on it and then putting that faith into the postal system that it will arrive, it's something that technology cannot and has not been able to replace yet," Ontario-based Shawn Jones told the CBC in the summer of 2026. "And hopefully it doesn't."