Waterloo, Iowa’s Soul Book Nook is the first and only Black-owned indie in a state where, according to the most recent U.S. Census, less than 4% of the population identifies as African American. “Looking at all of the division that was going on and happening around us, I felt my part to play in moving forward was to follow my dream,” said Amber Collins, who opened the store in September 2020.

“I opened in this location because I was here,” she explained. “You begin where you’re at.” Collins added that her family moved to Waterloo from the South during the Great Migration in the early 20th century. With 29% of its 68,000 residents identifying as BIPOC, Waterloo is second only to Des Moines among Iowa’s cities in terms of the share of BIPOC residents.

Collins lacked bookselling experience when she launched Soul Book Nook, but she had initiative and a commitment to community building—as well as a lifelong love of books. Prior to opening the store, she worked in social services and started a nonprofit to serve at-risk youth. “There’s been a range of things I’ve done to make the environment better where I live,” she said.

After the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in spring 2020, Collins looked for a way she could help make the world a better place. Because she was not participating in Black Lives Matter protests, she recalled, she “prayed to God for what to do, because I’m a Christian. I was asking God, ‘What is my part to play in this?’ I feel like the Holy Spirit led me here—to make me love books.”

So inspired, Collins decided to open a bookstore that would become a place in which “the community could all come together and everybody would feel welcome,” she said. “I felt like books would create that safe space.”

While searching that summer for a store to lease in downtown Waterloo, Collins operated a mobile bookstore called the Healing Source. She also built a store website and read up on how to start a small business. “I taught myself something every day: Who are the vendors? How do I pay taxes?” she said. “I mentored myself.”

After selling out of her truck for two months, Collins called upon a higher power for help to find a permanent location: “Lord, I just have to have a space,” she remembers praying. “And then that same day,” she said, “a guy who’d told me two or three times that he didn’t have a space to rent to me said yes, it was sitting there. That was unbelievable.”

Soul Book Nook’s inventory of 2,300 books for adults and for children is 50% new and 50% used. Collins is committed to a selection that “meets the needs of everybody who comes in,” she said. “We have fiction, nonfiction, historical, political science. We want to make sure all cultures are represented.”

Still, she said it is important that the store’s mix spotlights titles that would otherwise not be available to her customers. “With a focus on the BIPOC population, we felt that there was a greater need to put African American books and Indigenous books on the shelf so that children could see themselves represented,” she explained.

Collins freely admits that launching a business in a small city “with no funding, no grants, no loans” during a pandemic has been difficult, and the current rate of inflation hasn’t helped. Her two high school–age daughters help out at the store when needed to keep costs down, and she has expanded her store hours to attract more customers after taking a financial hit in August when she had to close for two weeks because she and her daughters had Covid.

“I want to know what works for our customers,” Collins said. “I need to figure out how best to engage, because I am not in the big city like Black Garnet”—a reference to a Minneapolis pop-up bookstore, also launched by a Black woman entrepreneur in the summer of 2020, that is moving into a storefront this summer.

Though Soul Book Nook is drawing local customers and has filled orders via its website from as far away as the U.K., Collins said that its base is the people in the small towns dotting north-central Iowa. “Customers from small towns, they’ve kept the doors open,” she said. “If it wasn’t for these small towns, I would have had to close my store.”

The past 18 months have presented many challenges as Collins navigates the business of bookselling, but she has no regrets. “You have to live your dream,” she said. “My bookstore has done what I wanted it to do: reached into the community. Despite chaos and tragedy and upheavals in our homes and in our nation, we have to continue to rebuild and build and not be scared. We have to start thinking about what’s vital, and that is about more than making money. It’s about progress and a culture of people ”