We recently connected with Charlie Selby and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Charlie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Our mission is to bring literature to a community that is situated in a literacy desert and has been done the disservice of being left behind in terms of allowing books to be seen as a source of joy and comfort rather than a Herculean task to be overcome.
In university, I studied English and Secondary Education in the hopes of bringing my own passion for reading, writing, and an appreciation of the English language to my students, and for a while, I did that. But the emotional toll of working within the public education system- a field that I still feel strongly about and have a passion for- made me consider the possibility of pivoting to something else while still focusing on literacy and the lack of access to it. I started my business as a way to continue serving my community from a different angle, continuing to promote literacy in all its forms will be the work of my life whether it’s through education, my business, or just everyday life. It has been- and always will be- my first love and truest passion.

Charlie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

A Novel Idea was created as a solution to the problem of literacy deserts in rural America. I was born and raised in the rural South and as a child, I was a voracious reader. I would- and still will- read anything I could get my hands on but given our location and lack of access to books outside of our limited public library, it was difficult to fully indulge that intense curiosity and imagination. So when I decided to leave education as my profession, I still wanted to still do something that related to books and literacy and A Novel Idea was born.
We opened in June of 2023 in a renovated utility building with a stock of used books that I had collected from our local library’s inventory off-loading sales, friends and family’s donations of books they no longer wanted, and some yard sales. By November or December of that same year, we had tentatively broken into buying new books for our inventory. We wanted to be able to have “a little bit of everything for everyone”.
Even as we grow and expand, we want to be able to provide easily affordable books to the local community so that we can foster and encourage a love of reading in all the generations that live here. That is why we will always provide used books in our inventory and we charge flat rates for them so that anyone, at any income, can come into our store and find something that they will love.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Funding for my business came from hard work, pure and simple. I was only a few years out of university, I worked as a substitute teacher for a while until I decided to pivot away from education and then worked as a barista at a coffee chain and an instructional assistant at a local dance studio. Working at those jobs and saving whatever money I could when I could was what funded my business.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The most important thing I had to unlearn was the idea that to be successful, I had to do everything on my own. Which as a person who was stubborn and in their early twenties at the time, seemed like an entirely rational thought to have. But it is the biggest lie that I ever tried to convince myself of.
My mother- who has run her and my father’s business for thirty-some years- finally had to sit me down and tell me that just because I needed to ask for help, and that was something that I would continue to need to do, that didn’t mean that I was failing. It meant that I was smart enough and self-aware enough to realize that there were people out there that knew more than me and I was willing to learn from them to help improve myself. It’s something that, if I’m being honest, I still struggle with, but it’s the most important lesson that I needed to both unlearn and then learn differently.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://charliejselby.wixsite.com/a-novel-idea
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a.novel.idea.crossville/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/A-Novel-Idea/100092500294113/