Baseball was never my sport as a kid. Growing up in Tucson, I played on a little league tee-ball team sponsored by Eastside Dental Service, called the ED’s…no I’m not kidding, our mascot was a felt tooth on a big green banner! We were horrible, made the Bad News Bears look like Team Cuba in the World Baseball Championship. That is, until the last game of my season with the ED’s.
We played the league’s best team, first place was already decided in their favor so there was nothing on the line other than their pride, and it was a trophy we happily took home with our only win of the season. And this was not just any win, but an old-fashioned trounce, it is a memory that will forever live in my mind.
In retrospect, as important as that win was to us, it was the season of losing that brought our team closer together, it was the cumulative losses that made the win so much sweeter and the team so much stronger.
In similar fashion, the obvious losses of last week’s Christian Book Expo are a tough pill to swallow. Low attendance, missed connections and publisher losses amount to a huge loss, one that has taken five years of planning and execution. Walking away from the Dallas Convention Center on Sunday was a sobering reminder that hard work doesn’t always equal success.
For those who don’t know, I work for ECPA, the organization that hosted CBE. My boss, Mark Kuyper, has had a vision for a consumer event since he became president in 2004. As I have heard him say many times, the word “publish” means to proclaim. In our world of Christian publishing, we understand this with an even greater measure of purpose. To publish content that points others toward a relationship with the living God is then a high calling of proclamation. It’s a business to be sure, but it’s a ministry all the same.
As the association for Christian publishers who endeavor to proclaim a message of love, grace and hope through the content they publish we see it as our job to help them bridge the gap between author and reader. That was the entire reasoning behind CBE, yet as one industry professional has written, “the leadership at ECPA swung for the fences this time…and they whiffed”. We went down swinging, and the toughest reality is that there was more on the line here than the outcome of a baseball game.
One thing is for sure though, we will not sit around and lick our wounds. There are legitimate reasons why CBE did not achieve the goals we had set for it, among which are:
- venue
- cost
- marketing
- messaging
Over the coming days, ECPA will be listening, particularly to our publishers who invested so much in this event, but also to those who attended as well as to those who did not attend. I know that an official overview will be offered via E-Link (ECPA’s member newsletter) with an opportunity for discussion at our upcoming Executive Leadership Summit in April.
To be sure, no one plans to strike out. We did not produce a win, yet I am so proud of the team I am on, we are all committed to seeing our members succeed in their mission. I look on hopefully as we press through the tough days ahead, believing that among the challenges such a loss delivers will be the wisdom and direction needed toward a future big win.
It is difficult to point out any positive for fear of diminishing the impact of such a disappointment, but I do want to share one picture that I believe displays the heart of what we hoped for, a CBE volunteer who received an e-mail from christianbook.com about CBE and within an hour had booked her hotel and airfare.
When I asked her if her reason for coming was to find good deals on books or if it was to meet authors who had a transforming message? Her response was to hold up her volunteer t-shirt with signatures from dozens of Christian authors, all of whom she met and was able to visit with (she said J.I. Packer told her he had never before signed a t-shirt). In response, she said “what do you think?”
I had many discussions with our publishers over the last few days, there was one question in particular that stands out, “Is ECPA committed to CBE?” my response was “As committed as you are”. In the end, this is a team effort, one that will take lots of input and participation from our members and if we are allowed another turn at the plate we believe this loss will have prepared us all for a much better result.
