Book Club Associates

Book Club Associates (BCA) was a mail-order and online book selling company in the United Kingdom. It came to dominate the mail-order book-club business in the U.K. in the 1970s and 1980s through extensive advertising in Sunday newspaper colour supplements and elsewhere, and became the largest mail-order bookseller in the U.K. The firm collapsed in 2012.

The BCA logo.

Origin

BCA was established in 1966 and was jointly owned by W.H. Smith and American Doubleday of The Reprint Society and their book club World Books.^[1]

Clubs

The company operated a variety of general and specialist book selling clubs over the years, including:^[2]

• The Mystery and Thriller Club
• Just Good Books
• The Softback Preview (TSP)
• The Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Club
• The Military and Aviation Book Society
• World Books

and many more.

In 2008, following reorganization, the company operated seven book selling clubs, having run as many as twenty two years earlier.^[3]

Customer service issues

The company started to receive adverse comment in UK national press in 2006 following the emergence of customer service standard problems, and its pursuance of customer financial arrears via debt collection agencies using psychologically aggressive and litigiously threatening working practices. The customer service issue was blamed by new Chief Executive, George Saul, on its outsourcing to an external agency of the customer complaints aspect of the business by the firm's previous management.^[2] In 2005, BCA's handling of complaints was criticised by trade regulator the Direct Marketing Authority.^[4] In 2007, the Office of Fair Trading accepted undertakings from BCA's management that it would revise its advertising to make the financial commitments that customers signing on to when they joined its book clubs more clear.^[5]

Restructuring and demise

In 2008, BCA was sold by its then owners the German corporation Bertelsmann to another German company, Aurelius, which restructured BCA,^[6] and sold it two years later to the British company The Webb Group in March 2011.^[7] Barely a year later, along with the demise of The Webb Group itself,^[8] BCA collapsed in financial insolvency.^[9]