Indie Bookstores ❤️ Indie Presses
An interview with Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA
March 18, 2026
*Pauses audiobook*
Today, we’re excited to feature our first bookseller interview! Booksellers play a huge role in everything we do at Libro.fm—from guiding our tech updates to powering our recommendations.
March is Indie Press Month, and like indie bookshops, small presses are vital to the publishing ecosystem, making sure new stories and voices are heard. In fact, many authors get their start with indie presses, and since plenty of these businesses are nonprofits or mission-driven, they’re often committed to building a more diverse industry. While they might release fewer books a year than “The Big Five” or other large publishers, they definitely don’t have less to offer!
Indie booksellers do a great job ushering small press books into the hands of readers. A few months ago, when we asked our followers on Instagram for their input on indie bookshops doing a great job at highlighting independent publishers, a handful of people called out Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA.
We reached out to our friends at Fountain to learn more about their work with small presses. A general interest store that’s been around since 1978, Fountain prides itself on being event-focused, hosting hundreds of in-store and offsite events each year to grow their community. Read on for an interview with Grace, a frontline bookseller at Fountain since 2021, as well as the store’s recommended reads and a giveaway!
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An interview with Fountain Bookstore
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why and how does Fountain Bookstore champion small presses?
Supporting small presses is absolutely necessary and instrumental in keeping indie bookstores’ growth on an upward trend.
Indie presses are teams of people doing the same basic things we do in our stores: curating spaces and ideas that may be underrepresented elsewhere. We, as booksellers, want to make connections with customers, and the books indie presses create offer unique ways to reach them.
As a staff, we all have a good grasp of small presses and each has genre preferences that sway us towards some of our personal favorites. This, in turn, allows us to have a substantial number of presses on our shelves. Our buyers also have a great eye for small titles to bring in, which is a huge help.
The pull for me from these books is feeling the intimacy with which they are created. Knowing that some of these presses print only 2-4 books a year makes me want to reach out to them even more. It’s a labor of love and respect to readers and authors to get these books printed, and it’s our job as booksellers to get them into the hands of as many readers as possible.
I also let the competitive side of myself take over sometimes, so if there is a small title that comes out that I adore I will tell our buyers to go all in on it. One of my favorite feelings as a bookseller is selling through copies of something no one has ever heard of, and for that customer to come back weeks later raving about it and asking for more. I also feel like, as a staff, whenever we find a small-press title we love and it speaks to us on such a personal level, we just have to share it with everyone.
We have different projects throughout the year to encourage our customers to read small presses and spread the word about them far and wide. A few include our JABBIES® (Judge-A-Book-By-Its-Spine®) program, where we host different people from publishing (editors, CEOs, sales reps, etc.), and our customers get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create a book.
Another is our Small Press Spotlight display, where we highlight one press in-store with a brief summary of their mission and include a list of our staff picks, customer favorites, and timeless picks in-store and on the front page of our website.
The newest project we did was the Twelve Days of Small-Press-Mas, which my coworker Charlie and I led during the holiday season. We created backlists for 12 presses and featured them on our website and social media to encourage our customers to pick up a book from a press they had not heard of before.
There are some titles I’ve read (La Familia Grande by Camille Kouchner - Other Press, Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin - Catapult, Mammoth by Eva Baltaser - Other Stories, I Love Shopping by Lauren Cook - Nightboat Books) that I will never forget and, as cheesy as it sounds, changed my perspective of myself, others, and my reading habits. Genuinely there is no better feeling than finding the book made for you.
Whenever I have that eureka moment with a title, I know there are people like me who don’t have as much access to these presses as I do, so it’s my job to find these customers and lead them to something they almost certainly would not have found on their own.
Do you have any tips for readers who want to read more books from independent publishers?
Ask a bookseller for recs!! At any store I go to, whether it’s in Richmond or when I travel, asking booksellers for their favorite small press rec is a highlight for me and 9/10 an automatic buy. I also encourage customers to look into publishers based on the genre they prefer, as that can be a big stepping stone for them. We now have customers who only buy CLASH horror, Milkweed poetry titles, or Europa Editions for translated fiction because that’s their preferred genre, and they know those publishers do great work with each title they release.
Encouraging readers to branch into translated fiction has been essential for us and supporting small presses, as I feel a lot of people are hesitant or intimidated by the idea of reading something translated. Now, I feel as if close to 50% of our customers are buying translated titles, whether they realize it or not.
What are some of your go-to audiobook recommendations from a small press?
I’ve actually asked our bookclub coordinator, Kate, to supply me with her picks, as she is the queen of our audiobook recs. So without further ado, here are [some of] her favorites!
The Mean Ones by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne, narrated by Annalee Scott | Published by Creature Publishing, audiobook by Dreamscape Media
Fathers and Fugitives by S.J. Naudé, narrated by Simon Sharp | Published by Europa, audiobook by Europa
The Captive by Kit Burgoyne, narrated by Tom Kiteley | Published by Soho Press, audiobook by Recorded Books, Inc.
Spit Back the Bones by Teagan Olivia King, narrated by Krys Janae | Published by Turner Publishing Company, audiobook by Tantor Media, Inc
This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller, narrated by Krystal Hammond | Published by Quirk/Andres McMeel Publishing, audiobook by Blackstone Publishing
Funeral Song by Carly Racklin, narrated by Rosie Cusack | Published by Dead Sky Publishing, audiobook by Dead Sky Publishing
Win a copy of The Mean Ones!
Win an audiobook copy of Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s The Mean Ones, as recommended by our bookselling friends at Fountain Bookstore. To enter, just let us know in the comments which indie press you love to support, and we’ll announce the winner in our next newsletter!
That’s a wrap on this edition of Headphones On 🎧 Thanks so much to Fountain Bookstore for answering our questions, and we hope all of you have left with some great small presses to check out! We’ll be back in two weeks with a digest of recommendations for your TBR.
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Thanks again for reading! Feel free to now return to your audiobook.
*Presses play*
Coming to you from San Francisco, this newsletter is written by me, Olivia Butze—hi! As the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications, you’ll find me running our social media accounts, creating brand campaigns, and working on all things email related. I’m passionate about storytelling as a catalyst for societal change, and my favorite activities include long audiobook walks, drinking matcha lattes, and reading in Golden Gate Park.
I like what Pivot Press Books is doing with their publishing house.
I'm newer to indie presses, but have noticed I like a lot of Blackstone Publishing audiobooks I read. So this has inspired me to dive into their work more!