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"Why Should I Take A Loss To Sell Them Test Books?"

Most small publishers have a harder time understanding the benefits. The vice president of BAF has always told me that if the publishers gave the test books to them for free they would still lose money on the test. Testing 500 books takes a lot more time, effort and shipping expense per book than to rollout with a production run of 100,000. Smart smaller publishers lucky enough to get a test order jump to fulfill it!

You can create a lot of demand in the market and bookstores by doing transactions like these. The reps from BAF generally are in and out in a day or two at a location. When the books start circulating around the office or with friends and family they tend to create interest (buzz). If someone wants to buy the book at that point, they are driven to the bookstore, Amazon.com, the publisher, or the publishers website.

The BAF customer is not the typical customer that goes to a bookstore to buy a book and therefore selling to them does not compete with the bookstore sales. In fact, it creates sales at the store level. More often, their customer is at work and they see the book at a discount and just can't pass it up. Their typical customer would probably not have bought the book if it were not for the fact that it was basically delivered to them at a discount.

I can remember when the original Chicken Soup for the Soul first came out. BAF tested the book and ordered 60,000 copies. They sold out of the initial order very quickly and ordered another 60,000 copies. Before the second order was sold out, the book hit the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there for a long, long time. BAF has sold more than one million copies in the Chicken Soup series.

How They Find Books.

The company is always searching for new books. The buyers are inundated with over 20,000 new books each year to find the 400 to 500 titles that will generate sales of each title between 10,000 and 250,000 copies. The average is 65,000 copies per title.

For the most part, each member of BAF's team of 13 buyers is assigned to specific publishers. They deal with every major publisher in the country, and every time the new publisher comes out with a new catalogue the buyer and the publishers rep go through the catalogue to see which books BAF might want to test. Books Are Fun's impressive vendor list include: Random House, Publications International, Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, Meredith, Penguin-Putnam, Time Life, Blue Mountain Arts, DK, Quail Ridge Publishing, Simon & Schuster, and many more.

BAF also works with hundreds of small and medium sized publishers. Most have a special markets representative that either works for the publisher or they use independent rep/brokers that present their books to the BAF buyer.

Many distributors have relationships with a buyer and present books to BAF and the books are seen that way. Smaller distributors often use independent commissioned sales reps or brokers that present their books to the BAF buyer.