Thomas Edison once wrote, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Except for the overalls, Jeff Adams of Jeff’s Touring Discount Books in Rochester, New York matches Edison’s description perfectly. In a recent conversation with Bargain Book News, Adams explained how working hard, asking questions and playing squash all helped him build a successful remainder book wholesale business.
 
1.      Please tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up and what did you do before you got into the book business?
 
I was born and raised in North Tonawanda, New York, which is between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. My dad was a car mechanic and he built his own gas station. Above that he built living quarters, so I was born and raised basically in a gas station. It was no surprise then that in my teenage years I was a car mechanic myself. I married my high school sweetheart just after we graduated. We were both 18 at the time and we’re still married today.
At age 22, I decided to go into business selling tires. I chose that business because when I was working as a mechanic, I was pretty good at selling tires. So I told the people that we used to buy tires from that I’d like to sell tires for myself.  They said, “Sure, we’ll help you out, but you can’t sell tires here because we do it here. Go someplace else.” Rochester was the closest, reasonably sized town so I just picked it, randomly. That’s how I got into the tire business and that’s how I got to Rochester. I came here not knowing anyone and I sold tires here for 24 years.
 
2.  Why did you move from tires to books? 
 
I ended the tire business about eleven years ago. Books made sense on one level because my wife, Nel, and I used to go on vacations to places with a lot of bookstores. Both of us like books, so we would just hang around the bookstores when we were traveling.


After I got out of the tire business, it actually took me a year to figure out what I wanted to do. I was going to used bookstores, investigated that as a business possibility, and quickly realized that I was not nearly smart enough to have a used bookstore. You really have to know books. I could live to be a hundred and I still wouldn’t know enough to be in the used books business. So, I was very discouraged, but then I wandered into a Book Warehouse in Rochester and started talking with the guy behind the counter whose name was Jim Scott. He was very friendly and easy to talk to. It turns out that—after talking to him for a little while—I realized that end of the book business was much more like the tire business. You just bought and sold. You obviously had to know what you were doing, of course, but I felt like I could fumble my way around and learn from that without killing myself.
 
3.   How did you move from that conversation with Jim Scott to opening your own remainder wholesale business?
 
After that conversation, I thought about the idea and then went back to Jim Scott and hired him to be my mentor. If you knew Jim Scott, he’s the kind of guy that—things just fall his way. For some reason or another, people will just do anything for him. So the fact that I would pay him to do this would come as no surprise to anybody who knew him. Anyway, he agreed to be my mentor and I went to my first CIROBE with him. He introduced me to people and eventually I joined the Affiliated Value Booksellers, which was Larry May’s deal. I got to meet a lot of people and of course I learned a great deal from these people. I was the new kid on the block and people were very helpful.
 
3.       You started in retail, correct?
 
I put a retail store, Jeff’s Books, up in Rochester and began doing that. And then as I was buying books I started looking around a little bit on my own. Besides buying things from Larry, I bought a few deals, which were more than I could handle, of course, so I began to sell a little bit wholesale. Eventually I realized that I was not cut out to be in the retail business, because my personality and retail clash. So I hired somebody to manage the resale side and I began to work wholesale.
 
5.      How did your experience in the tire retail/wholesale business help with what you are doing today?
 
When I was in the tire business, which was the wholesale tire business, I was kind of in a commodity situation. You know, you buy them cheap, and you sell them for a little more than you paid for them. I was always pretty good at finding deals. I’d find this guy who had this stuff out in Oklahoma or something like that and I’d buy them, sell them to somebody else. The same is true for bargain books. It’s all about working hard to find the deals.
 
6.      Tell us about the name of your business. How did you come up with Jeff’s Touring Discount Bookstores?
 
The touring thing really has to do with the first business plan that I did. I tried to get some money from the SBA (Small Business Administration), so I had to have a business plan. The original idea was that I would put sections into stores that would be bargain books, but in a hardware store or something like that. I would call each one of those “Jeff’s Touring” to give the impression that it would travel from place to place. That idea never came to be, but I incorporated the name so it stuck. Because the name is goofy, it’s remembered enough. Having an odd name can be helpful, particularly in the beginning, when no one knows you. People can remember you, regardless of whether they think highly of the name or not. So, it’s kind of like, “I don’t care what you call me as long as you call me.”
 
7.      You still have a retail store, but at some point you got into wholesale. Can you tell us how that happened?
 
The transition into wholesale was a gradual kind of thing. Literally, at the end of the first year in the book business, I began doing a little bit of wholesale. We still maintain the retail store in Rochester, but my focus now is wholesale. I do think that having the retail experience is important because having some exposure to that side helps my wholesale business. When I talk to my customers, I can talk their language a little better. That’s the same reason why we do some stuff on Amazon and the internet. It helps me to understand what the problems are much better than I could if I didn’t have any internet experience. I think that my peers in this business—in the wholesale business—are smarter than I am, so they can do it by themselves. But I need the extra help that comes from some of these experiences.
 
8.      Do you have a niche in the wholesale business or do you buy and sell deal by deal?
 
The only niche that I have is the fact that I can find so many deals. Some of it is just by chance but part of it is because I work a lot. I worked seven days a week for a long, long time. When I first started—I still do, sometimes—I’d go home for dinner and come back and work some more at night. So it’s not unusual for me to put 60, 70 hours in a week. One of the reasons I get some of these deals is the fact that at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, I’m still working. Most of my brethren are not. So if someone’s calling around, trying to talk to someone about a deal, I’m here. I pick up some stuff that way, and plus I think people feel sorry for me. Not everything’s a deal, obviously, but every once in a while, I can find some real diamonds among the coal and at the right price and the right quantity and all that kind of stuff.
 
9.      How deep into a title do you purchase?
 
I had a couple of titles that hit 30,000, but typically, I’d buy 2000 or less.
 
10.  What is the biggest buy you have made in the book industry?
 
In terms of sheer numbers, I once bought about 14 truckloads. It was the most I ever sold and it took me two years to put together the deal. That time I sold 425,000 books to one customer at one time. It sounds impressive, but it wasn’t. Really, I’m a small player, so those numbers aren’t impressive
 
11.  Do you warehouse or is the wholesale integrated with the retail?
 
I have a warehouse in Rochester. When we started, we had 1500-square-feet, and now we have almost 60,000-square-feet. We inventory about two million books.
 
12.  How many employees do you have?
 
We have about 16 or 17 employees—that’s including the retail, too.
 
13.  Is this a family business?
 
My wife’s been my partner through this thing. She’s been an integral part of this venture from day one and without her undying support, and probably blind loyalty, I never could have done any of this. At the same time, she owns her own business as well. She’s in the yarn business. She sells knitting supplies, which she has been doing on her own for twenty years and does very well. We also have two grown daughters who both have good jobs.
 
14. Do you have a website?
 
No we don’t. It doesn’t seem to fit us too well so we haven’t done it. You can sell books through Amazon’s site, which a lot of our customers do. We do some of that but not a great deal.
 
15. What would you say is the greatest challenge facing the bargain book industry?
 
Certainly the consolidation of everything. It is incredible the amount of shrinkage in terms of the numbers of players in front line publishing. They are making exclusive deals with remainder companies and that cuts us little guys out. We still have a niche and as long as publishers continue to make errors, that is overproduce, then there will still be a need for us. Once they smarten up then we are out of business. Let’s face it, you see some of these remainder lists and there will be a Danielle Steel title with 300,000 left over. How do you make a mistake by 300,000 every time? Six months later you see another Danielle Steel and it’s 382,000. The first time you can understand and the second time you start to wonder, but by the fifth or sixth time you say to yourself, there is something about this business that I don’t understand.
 
16. Do you sell overseas?
 
We do. We sell around the country and all over the world. The overseas sales really depend on the product we are into at the moment. Two years ago we were probably selling 25 to 30% of our product overseas. Lately, it has been very little. It really depends on what they are interested in.
 
17. Is selling overseas risky?
 
Yes because of the distance. For example, if they decide not to pay you it is very difficult to put any pressure on them to do that. We have been lucky though in not being burned. We are very cautious on credit.
 
18. Are collections difficult no matter where your customers are located?
 
It really depends on the customer and the deal. It is a negotiated kind of thing; a judgment call. Everybody tries to make the right judgment and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. Extending credit any time is always risky.
 
19. Are trade shows important to you?
 
Yes. We go to CIROBE, BookExpo, The Spring Book Show, Onboard, and occasionally we will do a regional, but generally they are not very good for bargain book dealers.
 
20. Whom do you view as your competition?
 
Anybody else who is selling books wholesale I guess. They are my competition but I am not competition for them because my overall impact in the industry is small.
 
21. Do you sell to frontline stores or mainly value-oriented stores?
 
Our customers cover the whole gamut. Certainly we sell things to Barnes & Noble and Borders, but we also sell to the guy who has a variety store and wants to put in a rack of paperbacks.
 
22. Do you have a business philosophy that you try to live by?
 
I try to run my business like I try to live my life, with honesty and integrity. And of course, I work hard.
 
23. We heard you were quite a squash player. Do you still play?
 
I don’t play any longer because my knees won’t tolerate it. Squash is a game kind of like racquetball. Not too many people know about squash but what is interesting about the game in this area is that it is played by Ivy League graduates, which I am not. As a result, my being able to play squash gave me a lot of business contacts. When I went into the book business and I needed some money, I had some contacts through my squash playing that I could tap into. That helped me a great deal.
 
24.    Since your squash days are over, what do you enjoy doing for recreation?
 
Every day if I can, I call my grandchildren who live in the Detroit area. My grandson is eight and my granddaughter is five. I send them both books and keep duplicates here. So when I call, my grandson, who is a good reader, will read to me a chapter or two out of a book every day. We have read several books together that way. And the younger one, she follows along looking at the pictures as I read to her. That gives me good contact with my grandchildren and I believe that reading as much as possible is a good thing for them to do.
 
25. What is your favorite book and why?
 
My favorite book is Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose. I just think it is a great book.
 
Maryellen Duckett is a Tennessee-based freelance writer for National Geographic Traveler, Family Fun, and On the Road with Hampton magazines. She and her husband, Randall, are co-authors of the family travel books 100 Secrets of the Smokies and 100 Secrets of the Carolina Coast (Rutledge Hill Press).