A message from Geni Hulsey, president of the Church Bookstore Network:

By now, most of you have begun to receive your Christmas merchandise. I was in the backroom of our church store this week and our manager's office looked like an early version of The Night Before Christmas.

I can remember well every year I would ask, "Did I really order this much stuff?" I would look around the store and wonder where we would put it all.

With that in mind, let me suggest that this is a great time of year to do two things: One, surprise your customers with a gift sale—and rid yourself of anything that looks like spring or summer. And, two, do book returns.

It seems that returning books is one of the best kept secrets in this business, yet it is one of the best business strategies available to the retailer. Almost all Christian publishers allow for a percentage of returns each year, and in the past few years, many of them have begun paying for the return freight.

There is very positive method in this madness-for both you and the vendor.

For the retailer, rather than investing new dollars you have credits that you can purchase against in order to pull in new titles that you might not be willing to bring in if you had to use new money for them. When dollars are tight, we might not be willing to buy even two or three copies of a new author, but with credits we can afford to give it a try.

From the vendors' perspective, it might mean that you bring in that new author they are introducing and trying to provide exposure for, making a win-win situation. Or you might order 12 copies of a book—to create an endcap—of which you would only have ordered three copies without the credit.

So, having return credits gives the retailer some freedom to expand their inventory and the vendor opportunity to have more exposure in your store.

What do Christmas products have to do with returns, you may be asking? Cleaning off your shelves and getting ready to place the new Christmas books and gifts provides the ideal opportunity to pull returns. You may have a P.O.S. system that gives you a list of books that need to be returned based on sales, but I still love the old-fashioned way of physically just going through the books one by one and deciding if they need to be returned.

If you do that now, the credits will arrive in time to be used against your winter front list-and that will feel very good when the bills begin to arrive in January and February, when there is a chance business will be slower than through the Christmas holiday.

Be sure you know the rules each publisher or distributor has for returns. When you are ordering, make note if a title or an order is eligible for free return freight.

Handling returns also allows our stores to always look fresh and relevant. So take advantage of this great benefit as you prepare to introduce your Christmas merchandise.

Merry Christmas—and many happy returns!