What are some upcoming trends for the next year?

Independent publishing can leave you feeling at times like you’re pushing water up a hill with a broom, but it’s also a very supportive and creative community that I feel fortunate to be a part of. Oftentimes, if there is a substantial success in our world, you see the work being parroted by paperback imprints at corporate presses or authors signing deals with them for larger advances.

At Two Dollar Radio, I feel it’s vital that we ignore and don’t pander to trends. Our responsibility in the publishing ecosystem is to keep readers on their toes, not knowing what will come next. Not only so that our work does not become co-opted, but so that—along with all of the other independent presses—we’re collectively jostling literary culture’s status quo.

What books/genres/topics are you interested in?

As a press best known for fiction, in 2016 we released our first graphic novel, a collaboration between Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo and Scott McClanahan, about troubled musician and artist Daniel Johnston (The Incantations of Daniel Johnston). It was fun! In 2017, we’re publishing our fourth book by Joshua Mohr, Sirens, which is his first memoir; a comic adventure in the contemporary American South by rock star J.D. Wilkes (The Vine that Ate the South); a novel by Slovak writer Jana Beňová, called Seeing People Off, that won the European Union Prize for Literature; and a genre-defying debut novel by N.J. Campbell based on found audio recordings (appropriately titled Found Audio). It’s going to be fun!

While we work with agents about half the time, we also accept unsolicited submissions, which I feel is important. Many times the agented manuscripts we receive are well-crafted and polished, but they just aren’t perfect for us as a press. It doesn’t behoove us, in terms of maintaining an identity, to publish work that could also be published by Penguin Random House.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working in publishing, it’s that there is no formula and that readers will surprise you. I love that. The books that do the best for us aren’t the ones that look on paper like the easiest to sell. The books that do break out are those that are also a bit frightening: the nervy, distinctive work that engages readers and, hopefully, blows their hair back.

What’s unique about your corner of the publishing industry?

The outsider status (imagined or not) is something I appreciate about being based in Columbus, Ohio. Many of the presses I’m continually excited and inspired by—like Dorothy, Small Beer, Coffee House, Curbside Splendor, and others—are also geographically based outside of New Brooklyn, in cities like St. Louis; Northampton, Massachusetts; Minneapolis; and Chicago. They’re just doing their own thing regardless of what might be trending or not. That spirit is what is special about independent publishing.

I spent a summer while in college living in Snowmass Village, Colorado, near where Hunter Thompson lived in Woody Creek, just outside Aspen. You couldn’t not spot Thompson’s house along the main roadway leading into Aspen because he’d painted a massive yellow fist on the roof, its middle finger raised. Independent publishing is kind of like that.

Eric Obenauf is the editorial director of Two Dollar Radio, a press he founded with his wife, Eliza, based in Columbus, Ohio. Their books have been honored by the National Book Foundation, Editors’ Choice picks at the New York Times Book Review, finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and best of the year at O, The Oprah Magazine, NPR, the Washington Post, Slate, Salon, and others. This fall, he was a finalist in Publishers Weekly’s 2016 Star Watch program.