Service95, Mail Clubs, and the Marketing of Belonging

We all just want to belong to something

I run an in-person book club in the Twin Cities. What that has taught me, more than anything about books or facilitation, is that my cup has never been fuller than when I get to talk about books in person with other readers. I used to think being part of a book "community" meant consuming book content online or occasionally contributing to a book lovers Facebook group (I'm a millennial, okay). It turns out that connection built around shared content consumption is not really the community building we think it is. But it is absolutely marketed to us like that, and we keep buying it.

Let's talk about it.

Service95 and the feeling of belonging

Dua Lipa’s Service95 is one of the most visible examples of this right now and to be genuine about it: the curation is solid. The June 2026 pick is Kae Tempest’s Having Spent Life Seeking and past picks include There There by Tommy Orange, which has been on my list for a while. The author interviews are substantive, the playlists and reading lists are thoughtful, and overall, you can tell this is a genuine passion project. The branding is also cool.

Service95 works like this: each month Dua Lipa picks a book, interviews the author, and subscribers receive reading lists, playlists, and essays around the pick. There’s also an Instagram where you can engage with other readers and other social accounts like TikTok. I think you can also email your thoughts to an inbox. Also on the site, there are articles on everything from style to activism.

What there isn’t, and what “book club” wants us to feel, is reciprocity. Service95 is a brand based on the curation of Dua Lipa’s experience and taste delivered at scale. Dua Lipa may genuinely care about reading and have good politics, but she is also a wildly wealthy celebrity.

 The marketing of this as a “book club” promises that we can be a part of something cool, in a club with Dua Lipa, but it’s just aspirational content consumption we hope, this time, will make us feel like we belong.

Mail clubs, for example

Service95 is not alone. Mail clubs have gone viral in the most analog way possible. Creators send subscribers monthly envelopes of postcards, stickers, art prints, zines, recipes, sometimes handwritten notes and more for a few dollars a month. Some have grown to thousands of subscribers.

To be clear: I think mail clubs are cool. People seem to be genuinely excited to get snail mail every month. It makes them feel more tangibly connected than other ways to engage on the internet (like, comment, subscribe!). However, as these mail clubs get bigger and bigger, the personal touches that made us feel more connected have to decrease in order to scale with growth. And scalable is what a product has to be.

These are two different cultural corners using the same word and the same promise to market their product and they have thousands of subscribers.

Why this is everywhere right now

It is worth asking why we are seeing creators or brands using words like “club” in their marketing with particular popularity right now. If you even just search “mail clubs”, there is an unlimited number of creators making content about their mail club on TikTok. In the last few years we have seen celebrities and influencers alike start their own book clubs with increased frequency (Orion Carloto’s Bible Study (2025), Dakota Johnson’s Tea Time Book Club (2024), Amerie’s Book Club (2019), Emma Roberts’ Belletrist (2017), Reese’s Book Club (2017)). While public figure book clubs are not new, Oprah’s book club has been around for 30 years, the question is why this type of marketing is so uniquely resonant right now.

The answer is obvious but also points to the geriatric stage of social media we find ourselves in currently. Social media is dead as we knew it, a place once connecting us with people we actually know, now just organizing us into consumers and creators. The people we used to follow became influencers. The conversations we used to have became content. And somewhere in all that, parasocial relationships eclipsed real life connections. Yet our need for the real thing endures because we're human.

We are aware of this now in a way we weren’t five years ago. And rather than address the heart of the problem, we are buying subscriptions that simulate the feeling of community without having to actually show up for anyone. Plus I fear it is too early days to know if the “going analog” trends will amount to anything.

There's also where we are economically in the US. To some, the $7 mail club will have to be enough, budget wise and time wise. Reading itself can become a virtue signal for a class of people with leisure time, and showing up to in-person events is a privilege not everyone has. That's a longer conversation for another post. Here I’m just looking at belonging as a uniquely effective marketing tool and why.

What this means for where you spend your reading life

Subscribe to the popular book clubs like Service95 and mail clubs: book clubs make reading fun and mail clubs often support indie artists. I would also be doing this take a disservice if I didn’t acknowledge that for those outside the Twin Cities, Soft Cover is just content consumption on the internet too.   I think the more useful meaning lands at identifying the difference between belonging to something and being marketed belonging to something. The latter simply cannot replace the former.

There are also other book clubs and communities that of course are able to achieve both. Join those. Show up in person. When I think about who is doing that right I think about NoName Book Club for example. NoName Book Club was founded in 2019 by the Chicago based rapper and activist, NoName. The Book Club is both an online community and operates through in-person chapters focusing on BIPOC voices mainly in non-fiction, political theory, and social theory.

I acknowledge that consuming to belong feels safe and easy. Safer and easier than putting yourself out there. As someone who finds myself a transplant in a new city every few years, I get it. I may not find my vibe the first try, or the second, or maybe even the third time I join a new community, and each time is going to feel vulnerable. I joined a queer group that meets every Thursday evening and I'm often the youngest person there by a few decades, but I keep showing up when I can. What it has taught me is how good it feels to connect with others and find commonality with those I may not have met otherwise.

This is what a book club is. An in-person book club. It can be vulnerable. Not every book club may be your vibe. But I am of the belief that we are better together and together does not mean subscribed to the same thing.