Inside An Indie Press Hit

Eric Obenauf of Two Dollar Radio answers questions about I Will Die In A Foreign Land

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I’ve been following the success of I Will Die In A Foreign Land, a novel by Kalani Pickhart published in October 2021. The kudos started rolling in when it was first published last fall and, as the novel is about Ukraine, have continued, picking up “timely reads” nods. Last month, Pickhart won the prestigious Young Lions Award, the news of which gave me a welcome serotonin lift.

It was easy to find reviews of the book, and pictures of a smiling Pickhart upon receipt of the award, but I could not find anything that discussed the publisher’s role in the novel’s success, or anything about how the novel came to be. It was published by Two Dollar Radio, a press based in Columbus, Ohio, founded in 2005 by Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf. Two Dollar Radio has established itself as one of the nation’s best publishers of innovative fiction, and done so without the noise that usually accompanies such an impressive climb. Perhaps this is because they are Ohio-based, or perhaps because of the founders’ temperaments. I’ve never met Eliza, but Eric always strikes me as remarkably calm, especially given the constant ragged dramas of indie publishing—the cycles of boom and bust, the indignities of being overlooked, the cutting in line by larger presses. While the rest of us rush about declaiming and decrying (aka me, every week in this newsletter), Two Dollar Radio just goes about its business.

I wanted the press to feature more prominently when reading about Pickhart’s kudos, and I was also curious, so I just sent Eric an email and asked if he’d answer a few questions about the publication history of I Will Die In A Foreign Land. I figured you guys, who are also interested in, well, notes from a small press, would also be interested. He graciously agreed; below is an edited version of our email correspondence.

What was the acquisition process like?

I Will Die in a Foreign Land was submitted to us as an un-agented, unsolicited submission through the slush pile. It was flagged by one of our readers as worth checking out. I found the subject and setting to be incredibly intriguing, and the story it told extremely powerful and moving.

After reading through the first ~75 pages I reached out to Kalani to ensure that the rights were still available before continuing. Kalani let me know that they were, I finished my read over the holiday break, and made an offer. It was a pretty easy and straightforward process, relatively stress-free.

What was your publicity and marketing plan for the book? Was it unusual or similar to what you do for any of your titles? 

I'd say it was pretty unusual when given the full picture of the book's life.

We did a good amount of editing with Kalani on the book on tight deadlines to get it to the point where we wanted it to be, which didn't give us as much lead-time as we would have liked. This was probably the most stressful part. We initially presented it to our sales reps, and they encouraged us to do a hardcover edition rather than paperback, which is more standard for us. I had been loving the classy paper-over-board hardcovers that Two Lines Press had been doing, particularly Elvira Navarro's Rabbit Island, so we decided to go for it.

We really had our back against the wall in terms of getting blurbs in time for the final printing. It was definitely a title that indie booksellers got behind enthusiastically, and it was an Indie Next pick. It got starred reviews from most of the trades, and we did an initial hardcover printing of 5,000 copies, which we released late October. It was doing well through the holidays, but as the Russian aggression against Ukraine picked up in the new year, folks began really seeking it out.

The book is about four characters during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013-2014, when Ukrainians were protesting then-President Yanukovych's moves to align with Putin rather than Europe. In an unbelievably inspiring show of force, Ukrainians took to the streets in massive numbers, the military police shot and killed 100 civilians, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Ukrainian Revolution happened. So, the book puts a personal touch on this tumultuous time, while also providing a historical context to the current war.

As it was so timely, Ron Charles wrote about the book in February at the Washington Post, and covered it on his CBS News segment. NPR, BookRiot, and several other places covered it as a book to read about Ukraine.

Were your projections for the book accurate, or did it sell better/worse than you anticipated?

It's done better than we could have anticipated. We sold through the hardcover printing of 5,000 copies, pushed up a 10,000 paperback release from the fall to spring, and have just gone back for another 5,000 copies since the Young Lions Award announcement. We've also licensed foreign rights to Doubleday in the UK, Ambo|Anthos in Netherlands, and Shueisha in Japan, as well as film/tv rights to a Ukrainian-American producer.

When the title started to receive lots of kudos and prizes, was that a surprise?

I was stunned when Kalani won the Young Lions Award, but generally speaking - no. I'm naively optimistic, but I believe that both Kalani and the book deserve all the attention they have received.

Were there any stressful parts to the attention and awards?

We've been incredibly fortunate with our printer situation, considering all the stress and uncertainty that persists in the publishing world right now. We brought up moving forward the paperback release, and they managed to sneak us in for the 10,000-copy printing. The most stressful part of that was having to push the paperback printing six months earlier in the budget than we had originally planned.

Do you see this book as central to what you do at Two Dollar Radio or an aberration?

I do think that it's central to what we do at Two Dollar Radio, in that we're willing to deep-dive into our submission queue to find the right project. And then once we do find the right project, to then put in the elbow grease to editing and revisions to prepare it for publication.

We do publish a good amount of fiction by authors from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, such as Katya Apekina, Yelena Moskovich, and Jana Benova (Benova is the only translated author we've published). I see how the book shares some epistolary quirks similar to The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina and Alligator & Other Stories by Dima Alzayat, so I think it's very much in our wheelhouse.

That’s a lot of copies sold, and a lot of critical acclaim. It’s rare to combine those two, especially in the past year or so, when, it seems, publishers need to choose one of the other even more than is usually the case. Kudos to Two Dollar Radio! And thanks to Eric for taking the time to answer some questions. If you are near Columbus, stop by their bookstore; if not, pick up Pickhart’s novel or any other Two Dollar Radio title on their online store.

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Notes from a Small Press is the newsletter by Anne Trubek, the founder and owner of Belt Publishing.  Subscribe to receive every post. Oh and don’t forget to grab a copy of  So You Want to Publish a Book?, the book based on this newsletter that other people say good things about.