The organization will be promoting Christian books under the CBE banner at the 26th annual Miami Book Fair International, Nov. 8-15. ECPA staff will be selling best-sellers from around a dozen publishers at the association's booth during the closing weekend.

"In a lot of the interviews I have done with member houses, there's still a lot of interest in trying to raise awareness of Christian resources with consumers," said ECPA President Mark Kuyper. "The fact that the Miami Book Fair is the largest consumer book fair in the U.S., we thought we would conduct an experiment and see if we could take a single, collective booth for the industry."

The CBE initiative would be "very simple," he said, with himself and ECPA Director of Information and Education Michael Covington manning the booth. They will offer around 100 different SKUs, with discounts between 20% and 50%.

"We will see how it pans out, and if it is helpful and there is a lot of interest, we will make some decisions about what we might do in the future," Kuyper said.

With hopes of drawing as many as 15,000 attendees, the ECPA's first CBE--held March 20-22--attracted only 1,500 registrants, leaving the organization with a $250,000 shortfall. Member companies were asked to donate to help pay off the debts, with some saying they still supported the idea of connecting with consumers.

Crossway is one of the publishers supporting the Miami CBE promotion. "Our costs are negligible for participation-essentially we only have the cost of product," said Geoff Dennis, executive vice president for sales, marketing and media. In addition, "we thought we could gain further information about the potential for the success of an event of this type."

Publishers with their own booths in Miami will include Bridge-Logos Foundation, WORDsearch and Baker Publishing Group, whose President Dwight Baker said: "We always seek new ways to place our publications in the path of new readers, wherever these readers might gather. As one of the more successful regional book fairs, Miami qualifies for an exploratory visit. The second reason is educational; we want to witness how an established book fair functions."