The giant ICRS convention every year is one of the highlights of my year. It is when all the people in the Christian publishing world get together in one place and have a giant convention where all the publishers and other exhibiters show their new product line for the fall season. All the buyers come and walk around and look at what is coming out in the next few months to determine what is going to be at the top of their list or what they are going to promote to the consumer.
The ICRS show is also a time to see old friends and I love it for both of those reasons because it is also a time where I get to see other authors and artists from other publishers that I know, and of course most importantly the people from my own publisher - Multnomah, which is now a part of Random House. Also all of the media are here ready and waiting to promote different books for the fall. Lisa and I are about to come out with our next book For Parents Only: Getting Inside the Head of Your Kid. This ICRS was three days of running back and forth from one end of this giant convention center to another doing radio interview after radio interview, Podcast interview after Podcast interview 
and also a bunch of meetings to talk about the marketing and the strategy for promoting the book in the coming six months. For Parents Only comes out and hits stores in the middle of September, and because this is the first book that will come out under the new publishing order, now that Multnomah is a part of Random House, it is also a big experiment for us to learn a new way of working with this publisher and how their promotion strategies are different and how we need to be able to adapt ourselves to this new world in order to have the best possible impact in the market.
We also got a chance to meet with the new man who is going to be heading the Multnomah Group, Ken Peterson, who is leaving Tyndale - the publishing house he’d been at for over 30 years - to come on board as the head of the new Multnomah. Lisa and I were so glad to have a chance to sit down for two hours with Ken at lunch today, and hear his heart and share our vision that we have had for a number of years for the books that have come and the books that we are considering in the future. So this has been an extremely productive week. And a very tiring one!
I was also really glad that the convention was in Atlanta this year, where I live, because it meant I could bring 3 of my 5 staff members down with me for several days. Linda, Vance and Leslie have all been with me only over the last 2 or so years, and so although they know the industry from my side of things, it was an incredibly valuable thing for them to be able to see the scope of the industry as represented by all the exhibitors on the convention floor. Makes a huge difference also for them to meet and put a face with a name of the folks they work with every week over the phone at my publisher or speaker’s bureau or publicists’ offices.
Overall, though, probably my favorite thing about this particular ICRS week had been hearing the validation from the media people about the content of the new book. When we have been recording interviews and sharing some of the surprises we found about what is going on inside the heads of our kids, our interviewers often have teenage children and told us “Oh! My goodness, from the moment I read that section in the book, from the very next day things started to change in my family because I understood what my kid was going though.” Hearing that kind of encouragement and validation from various people who are totally unconnected with me, has been very, very encouraging. A lot of people believe authors look very confident in themselves. But really, inside, many of us are always very insecure about whether all this work and research and effort that we have put into our book is really going to touch people and change lives the way that we hope.
So, even if we hadn’t had all the other benefits of this ICRS show, even if that was the only thing that came out of this particular ICRS and all the craziness of the last three days, that would have been worth the whole thing — hearing that validation of the new message and how important helpful that is going to be. So if you’re reading this, please do pray that the Lord anoints this book to open parents’ eyes and helps them understand their kids even more, in a life-transforming way!