If I Did It Publisher Reflects on Faith
by Juli Cragg Hilliard, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 12/19/2007
Eric Kampmann, president of Midpoint Distributors and publisher of Beaufort Books, has hiked 1,500 miles of the 2,174-mile Appalachian Trail. It's customary for hikers to take trail names, and his is "Trail Thoughts." That's also the title of his forthcoming devotional book, which releases in January.
Trail Thoughts: A Daily Companion for Your Journey of Faith (Beaufort Books), selected for February by independent booksellers as a Book Sense Notable, is a quiet title with a reflective subject. It seems a sharp contrast to the storm Kampmann stirred up this summer when he decided to publish If I Did It—the supposedly hypothetical confession by O.J. Simpson to the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman—after HarperCollins walked away from the book and a bankruptcy court awarded the rights to Goldman's family.
"My feeling was that there was no reason I could see not to publish the book, because the Goldmans were going to be the beneficiaries," Kampmann said. He noted that Midpoint's distributing power and Beaufort's uncontroversial history put his company in the position to handle the hot potato project.
If I Did It came out in September, with additional comments from the Goldmans, celebrity crime writer Dominick Dunne, and the book's ghostwriter, Pablo F. Fenjves, who had been Nicole Simpson's neighbor. It has 207,000 copies in print, became a bestseller and is "still selling," Kampmann said. What was once so controversial has now become a non-issue. "It was an astonishing experience—one of the great experiences I've had in my life in terms of pure publishing," said Kampmann.
How does Kampmann draw a link between If I Did It and his own Trail Thoughts? He believes the key question is how his Christian principles carry through to the way he runs his company and published the Simpson book. "The word I think I would use is 'integrity.' Did I publish this with integrity?" he asked.
Kampmann traces his commitment to faith to the failure and bankruptcy in 1989 of his first company, which, he said, "turned me away from a way of thinking that was more secular and agnostic." He started reading the Bible every day in 1991. Now, he said, "Wouldn't miss it for the world. I've been on top of Mount Rainier. I've been in minus 30 degrees in a tent. And that's how I came to know it."
