Who doesn’t love getting book mail? A few years ago, Kathryn and I were talking about how fun it is to get books in the mail. We love the idea of monthly book subscriptions like Book of the Month, but it can get expensive and lead to running out of space on your bookshelves. So, we thought what if we got a group of friends together to mail books to each other and the idea for our Snail Mail Book Club was born! Read on for how it works…

First things first, what Snail Mail Book Club is not… it is not a pyramid scheme!! You know the ones I’m talking about that start with a chain letter that says if you send just one book, you’ll then get 3 books sent to you! Has that actually worked for anyone?

Here’s how Snail Mail Book Club works… We started with seven people in our group who each picked a book that they’d recommend, and those books get passed on to everyone else throughout the course of a year. Essentially, you have two months to read the book and pass it on to the next person, so the books end up going in a big circle until your book makes its way back to you!

And here’s what we love about Snail Mail Book Club:

• You only have to buy one book (and pay to mail 6 books throughout the year – tips for saving on postage below!) and you get to read six new books recommended by your friends! (The photos throughout this post are actual books from our previous snail mail rounds!)
• You get to open up a surprise book in the mail every other month! (If you are able to keep them secret – Kathryn and I love to talk about what books we’re reading so this can be hard for us when the other one hasn’t received a book yet!)
• While traditional book clubs require you to be able to meet in person (or at least be in compatible time zones for virtual meetings!), with a Snail Mail Book Club, you can include friends from all over – we’ve had members from 8 different states in the years that we have been doing Snail Mail Book Club!

If you want to start your own Snail Mail Book Club, here are some details to figure out first…

What guidelines do you want to have for choosing books?

When we started our only guideline was that it be a book that you’ve already read and would recommend to a friend; and that it be paperback so it’d be lightweight and less expensive to mail. For us, this was a great way to discover new authors and maybe read a genre that we wouldn’t typically pick up!

But you can put your own guidelines in place – maybe you all like the same genre? Maybe you want to put a guideline around page count (this is something we’ve thought about as we choose our books but haven’t made any rules around it!)? Another thing to think about is trigger warnings – think about what is right for your group.

What will your timing be for your Snail Mail Book Club?

How much time do you and your members need to read and mail on your books? Remember to account for shipping time! Our members read at different paces – some may read more than one book a week while others might need a few weeks. So we mail our books on every two months.

How many people will be in your group?

This is coming right after timing because for us, these things are connected. Once we decided on every two months, we decided that we should start with seven people so that the entire rotation lasted one year (1 book every 2 months = 6 books in a year, because you’ve already read your own book!). Keep in mind, the more people in the group, the longer it’ll take for the books to make it through the entire group.

We are now in our third round of our Snail Mail Book Club and we have just expanded to 9 people so it will take closer to a year and a half. But most of the group has participated in previous rounds and everyone was prepared to commit to the longer timing.

How will you communicate with your Snail Mail Book Club members?

We communicate with our members through a private Facebook group that we set up. We use the Facebook group to send reminders to mail books on every two months, share other great reads and, of course, post funny book memes! You could do the same thing via text or on another social media platform.

We also use google sheets to keep track of everyone’s addresses and who sends to who. An important thing to note is that you mail to the same person every time, that way the books are just going in a big circle! We had all of our members go in and add their addresses and ask them to keep their addresses updated if they move in the middle of the rotation.

Is it really a book club if you don’t get together to talk about the books?

With everyone reading the books at different times, we couldn’t schedule meetings to discuss the books together like in a traditional book club. This was something we debated about when we were planning our first round and I think we came up with a fun solution…

At the beginning, we ask everyone to send a notecard with their book. At the top they write the title of the book and then on the first few lines they write their name and a sentence or two about why they chose that book. Then, as the book gets passed along, everyone can add what they thought about the book to the notecard – but we make sure to remind everyone no spoilers!!

So as you get a new book in the mail, you can see what the people before you thought. And at the end, you get your book back along with everyone’s comments! Plus the notecard can double as a bookmark!

And now some tips that we’ve learned along the way…

• In the US, take advantage of USPS Media Mail! When you go to the post office, ask for media mail and you can get a discounted shipping price, which works for mailing any book!
• If you don’t already have the book you’ve selected, if you order on Amazon, you can have it sent directly to the first person so you just pay shipping once! Then if you are doing notecards as well, you can mail that separately.

And that is how we run our Snail Mail Book Clubs! We are now in our 3^rd year and it has been such a fun way to discover new books and keep in touch with our book-loving friends!

If you decide to start your own Snail Mail Book Club, let us know how it goes!

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