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Yours, From Ireland.

Letters and the Craft

Flower Letters alternatives: five honest options

Flower Letters alternatives split into two real categories: services that mail reproductions of documents someone actually wrote, and services that invent a correspondence and post it as fiction, the same lane The Flower Letters occupies. Letterjoy and History By Mail sit in the first group. Dear Holmes, a subscription built for a younger reader, and Yours, From Ireland sit in the second. Which one suits depends on what a subscriber actually wants in the envelope.

The Flower Letters itself: what a subscriber gets

Hannie and Michael Clark launched The Flower Letters from Utah in August 2020 with 38 subscribers, and the company now says it has mailed more than 1.8 million letters to over 31,000 subscribers. Hannie Clark writes and illustrates each story, and the business has grown from the couple’s home in Pleasant Grove to a warehouse in Orem with two dozen staff, according to USPS’s own account of the company.

A subscriber chooses one story before it starts, from a slate that currently includes a Second World War romance, a Wild West adventure, a Regency romance, a fantasy adventure, an archaeology adventure, and a story set during the American Revolution. Each of the twenty four letters arrives with keepsakes such as postcards, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and small period-style mementos, and the company states its stories generally suit readers twelve and up. Pricing runs $12.95 a month or $155.40 paid upfront for the full run, with free shipping inside the United States.

Letterjoy: real documents instead of an invented romance

Letterjoy is the most direct alternative for a reader who wants the letters themselves to be genuine rather than written for a plot. Its bundles start at $49 for a two-month starter of eight or more letters and run to just under $250 for a full year of 52 or more, delivered weekly with free USPS first-class postage on every tier. Six-month bundles let a subscriber pick a track, including military history, presidential history, famous authors, science and innovation, or stoicism, and each letter arrives with an accompanying article the company calls the Postscript, explaining who wrote it and why.

Where Flower Letters invents a correspondence and dresses it in period detail, Letterjoy reproduces documents that were actually written by named historical figures. That is the whole trade: a subscriber gives up a continuous plot in exchange for material that can, in principle, be checked against the archive it came from.

History By Mail: a rotating archive instead of one continuing plot

History By Mail runs the same real-document idea on a slower monthly cycle, themed roughly every four issues around subjects such as the Second World War or historic inventions, at $8.99 for a single month, $47.99 for six months, $87.99 for a year, or $164.99 for two years. The company says it has been operating for more than seven years, has mailed over a million letters to more than 100,000 subscribers, and appeared on Shark Tank’s sixteenth season, where Barbara Corcoran and a guest shark invested in the business.

Alongside each replica document, a separate context sheet names the author and recipient and explains the history behind it. It is a strong pick for a reader who wants breadth across many real voices rather than one invented pair of correspondents.

Dear Holmes: a mystery to solve rather than a romance to follow

Dear Holmes takes the fiction-by-post format somewhere neither Flower Letters nor the archive services go. A monthly membership, priced at $24.99 per mystery, mails four letters: three clues from a Victorian client followed by Sherlock Holmes’s own letter resolving the case, produced with MX Publishing, which describes itself as the largest specialist Sherlock Holmes publisher, working with Letterjoy. A subscriber who wants to work at the letters rather than simply read them will get more out of this than out of a linear romance plot.

Yours, From Ireland: one continuous story instead of six to choose from

Every option above asks a subscriber to pick a story before it starts, whether that means a genre and a setting on the Flower Letters shelf or a topic track on Letterjoy’s. Yours, From Ireland does not offer that choice, because there is only one story: Patrick O’Donnell, the second son of a family in Ballycastle, north Mayo, with no land coming to him because it goes to his elder brother, sails for Boston in October 1847 and promises to send for Mary Cafferky. Her father has other plans for her, a widower up the road with good ground. A third road runs alongside theirs, the youngest brother in the family taking the cheaper crossing to England rather than America. The decade the story crosses, 1847 to 1857, is real, even though none of the three siblings were.

That is a narrower proposition than a shelf of six genres, and it is worth being honest about who it suits. A reader drawn to Flower Letters for the choice of setting, Regency England or the American Revolution among them, will not find that choice here. A reader more interested in real Irish emigrant letters and the documented decade around the Great Famine than in picking a genre in advance is the better match, and the opening exchange is free to read in full at the sample letter before deciding.

The Adventure Letters: built for a reader under twelve

Flower Letters states its stories suit readers twelve and up, which still leaves a gap for a younger child who wants mail of their own. The Adventure Letters fills that gap directly, aimed originally at readers between about eight and thirteen, at $12.99 a month or $150 paid upfront for a year of two letters a month centred on US geography, with stickers, scrapbook pages, and conversation cards included in each mailing. It is not a competitor to Flower Letters so much as the option for the reader Flower Letters itself says it is not built for.

What historians cannot know

Both the archive services and the two story-based options above draw, directly or indirectly, on a record that is thinner than it looks. The National Archives of Ireland holds the Famine Relief Commission’s Distress Papers, letters and petitions that flowed into Dublin Castle as more than 600 local relief committees formed across the country by August 1846. The University of Galway’s Imirce archive, launched in March 2024 from a collection of roughly 7,000 letters that the historian Kerby Miller donated to the university in 2021, is one of the richest surviving records of Irish emigrant correspondence.

Both collections exist because a government office kept a file or a family happened to keep a letter. Neither is a random sample of who wrote home and who did not. Families who could not read, could not afford paper and postage, or simply lost contact for good left the thinnest trace of all, and no archive, however large, recovers what was never written down.

Choosing between Flower Letters alternatives

Match the format to the reason you are searching, rather than the other way round. If what matters most is that the letters themselves are real and traceable to an archive, Letterjoy or History By Mail will serve better than any story subscription, Flower Letters included. If the appeal is working a case rather than following a romance, Dear Holmes covers that ground on its own. If the reader is under twelve, The Adventure Letters is built for that age directly rather than as an edge case. And if the pull is toward one continuous story grounded in a documented decade of Irish history rather than a shelf of genres to pick from, a fuller comparison of Irish letter subscriptions sets that option against the rest in more detail.

None of this makes The Flower Letters a wrong choice. Six genres and a keepsake in every envelope is a real, well-built product for a reader who wants exactly that. It only stops being the right choice once you know what you were actually looking for when you searched for something similar to it.

Sources and further reading

  • The Flower Letters, FAQ, pricing, and story catalogue, theflowerletters.com, consulted 2026, with founder background and subscriber figures from USPS Employee News, “This business is built on tales by mail,” 7 October 2024
  • Letterjoy, bundle pricing and collection tracks, letterjoy.co/pages/pricing, consulted 2026
  • History By Mail, subscription plans and company background, historybymail.com, consulted 2026
  • Dear Holmes, membership pricing and format, dearholmes.com, consulted 2026
  • The Adventure Letters, subscription pricing and format, theadventureletters.com, consulted 2026
  • National Archives of Ireland, “Famine Records, Distress Papers and the Relief Commission,” research guide, nationalarchives.ie, and University of Galway, Imirce: The Kerby A. Miller Collection of Irish emigrant letters, launched March 2024

FROM THE LETTERS

Yours, From Ireland is one Irish family's story told in letters posted from Ireland: twenty-four letters over twelve months, two each month, one from Ireland and one in reply.

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