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Stray Voltage

Troubadour Booksellers: One of Charlotte’s new indie bookstores

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By Karen Garloch

At a time when many people thought independent bookstores were on the decline, Scott Tynes-Miller started a new one in Charlotte. In the nearly two years since Troubadour Booksellers opened in the Sardis Crossing shopping center, he says customer support has proved him right. “I saw what I thought was a void in east Charlotte,” Tynes-Miller says. “Our opening day was huge. We have a wonderful community of folks who are very glad we’re here. It’s exciting to be part of that.”

Troubadour joins Charlotte’s oldest independent bookstore – the nearly 50-year-old Park Road Books – as one of the city’s many options to Amazon, the online bookselling behemoth But Tynes-Miller says he doesn’t view Amazon as a competitor. “It’s more of an environmental obstacle. They are everywhere (and) they’re not going away any time soon….You need to create your niche within the world where Amazon exists.“We offer a level of customer service and customer experience and customer interaction that Amazon can never recreate.” That welcoming atmosphere draws people “to shop here rather than on Amazon,” he says.

Troubadour’s welcoming atmosphere starts with the sandwich board outside, announcing upcoming book club meetings, almost every week.Inside, visitors find a cozy sitting area furnished with a used leather sofa, comfortable chairs, and an old-fashioned typewriter, with blank paper rolled and ready to go. Book lovers can type their own short stories or poems and tape them on poster boards provided.Children are welcome too, as evidenced by the colorful back corner stocked with books, toys, games, and plush pint-sized chairs. The bathroom offers a diaper-changing table and complimentary supplies.

It’s just how Tynes-Miller imagined it should be, recalling the many wonderful bookstores he’s enjoyed throughout his life. “We want to be a place where people come to meet, to spend time, to read, and to congregate. We want to be the community living room.”

Tynes-Miller, 42, moved to Charlotte in 2011, after living for four years in Chicago. A native of upstate New York, he was “bitten by the acting bug” while attending Boston University and Elmira College. Without graduating, he moved to the Windy City for its thriving theater community.“I didn’t break through in the way I was hoping to,” he says. And he eventually followed a friend to Charlotte, where found work as one of four actors in the touring company of Children’s Theater of Charlotte, then called Taradiddle Players.It meant a full-time salary with benefits and a 12-month renewable contract, unusual job security for an actor.He loved the work—and fell in love with one of the other actors, Robin Tynes, who at the same time was starting Three Bone Theater, now in its 15th season.When they married in 2018, Scott Miller and Robin Tynes merged their names, and both adopted Tynes-Miller. They have a 5-year-old daughter.

Scott Tynes-Miller

Actors in the touring company not only performed the plays, but they also put up sets, took them down, and managed the sound systems. “It was a really hard job,” he says. And after driving around the Southeast for hundreds of performances, “my body started telling me it was time to move on.”Fortunately, he found work in the development department at Children’s Theater, where he managed fundraising. He stayed for 10 years before resigning in 2024 to open Troubadour, fulfilling a longtime dream.“I don’t know when it exactly happened,” he says, about wanting to open a bookstore. “I’ve always enjoyed visiting bookstores. Whenever you go into a bookstore, it feels like a magical place. I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to create something like that.” It had never felt like the right time until the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020 “when everyone was kind of reevaluating their lives.”“I started thinking about it more actively and talking about it with my wife and some friends. Everyone was very excited and encouraging.”

Despite the widespread impression that bricks-and-mortar bookstores are on the decline, “it was not the case at that time and is not the case now,” Tynes-Miller says. Over the last five years, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association. In 2025 alone, 422 new bookstores opened, a 31 percent rise from the year before.Troubadour is one of several indie bookstores that have opened in the Charlotte area in recent years. They include Belmont Bookshop in Belmont; Cleary’s Bookstore in Mount Holly; Fred and June’s Books in Mooresville and Denver; Goldberry Books in Concord; Editions Coffee Shop and Bookstore in Kannapolis, That’s Novel Books in Camp North End, and Trope Bookshop selling romance novels in a Plaza Midwood.

Troubadour has already attracted many fans and plays host to 10 book clubs each month. Some clubs just use the store to hold their meetings. Other clubs are moderated and curated by Tynes-Miller or one of his five part-time booksellers.He and his employees, all avid readers, try to collectively read most of the books they carry so they can answer customers’ questions.Tynes-Miller reads about 20 to 30 books a year, not as many as he would like. “I’ve always been a deliberate reader. I like to savor books.”After researching many stores, he made the conscious decision to stock only new books. “We carry a little bit of everything. Our focus is on critically acclaimed adult fiction and children’s books.”

Since opening, the selection has shifted more to genre fiction, a reaction to customer interest. “Romance. Romantasy. Fantasy. Sci-Fi. Horror. Those are all very popular. Romantasy is really the hot genre right now,” Tynes-Miller said.Three of the book clubs that meet at Troubadour focus on horror. “It has become a very popular genre for us.”As a result, he’s trying to read more of the popular books. Recently, he read Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a New York Times bestseller and a 2025 Barack Obama Summer Read by Stephen Graham Jones.“I was not much of a horror reader for much of my life. But I have grown a great appreciation for it. I try to read a little bit of everything.”

Tynes-Miller says he chose the name Troubadour as “a little bit of an homage to my past life, being touring actor.” But it can mean a lot of things, he says. “I like the idea of art being mobile and transferable. That book goes out into the world. It could be donated or sold or gifted. It could end up on the other side of the planet. There is also the journey that people take whenever they read. The metaphor can go as far as you want it to.”

Reach Troubadour Booksellers, (704)443-7076, https://troubadourbooksellers.com.

Karen Garloch will discuss her debut novel, Stray Voltage, at Troubadour Booksellers, 1721-7C Sardis Road N, on Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. The event will be moderated by owner Scott Tynes-Miller.

Karen Garloch spent forty-five years as a newspaper reporter in Ohio and North Carolina, including thirty years at the Charlotte Observer, where she was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. Her debut novel, Stray Voltage, won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction from Regal House Publishing. A native of Indiana, she graduated from Ball State University, where she is a member of the Journalism Hall of Fame. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Main Street Books: A Davidson Community Hub

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By Karen Garloch

Adah Fitzgerald

Visitors to downtown Davidson are sometimes surprised when they walk past Main Street Books and notice the three-tiered cart stacked with brown bags of paid-for books waiting for pickup. From inside the store, owner Adah Fitzgerald enjoys watching the reactions. “We hear people say, ‘What?!’ They cannot believe it just sits there all day, safe and sound.”

In this quaint town north of Charlotte, where Davidson College students pledge to an honor code, this trusting practice works just fine. Even when the cart has been accidentally left outside overnight, not a single book has been stolen since the system was instituted in 2020. It’s one of the things Fitzgerald loves about operating this independent bookstore in Davidson’s oldest building, a former general store at 126 S. Main Street.

At 47, the 2001 Davidson graduate has owned the bookstore with her mother, Mary Barone of Houston, TX, since 2015. They bought the business from Betty Reinke and Barbara Freund, who retired after running Main Street Books for 27 years. By the time Fitzgerald bought it, the store was already a beloved institution with lots of regulars. And she loved the location, nestled between the Fifth Third Bank and the popular Summit Coffee. At first, Fitzgerald ran the business in much the same way as the previous owners. She even left the dark stain on the original wide plank pine floor where the general store’s wood stove used to be.

The store had a great selection of books, but Fitzgerald had a different vision. “I wanted the store’s focus to be on recently published books. We’ve done a lot of work to build relationships with publishers and hone our book buying strategy and knowledge.” Things were going well. Then came the Covid pandemic. In March 2020, Fitzgerald had to close the store for a couple of months. Loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program allowed her to continue to pay staff. But they had difficulty selling books because their website wasn’t set up to take online orders. That’s when they started leaving books in the sidewalk cart for pickup by customers who sent orders through Google or called by phone. 

In July, Fitzgerald began meeting customers by appointment. Then in 2021, she made the “huge decision” to update her computer to offer a “customer-facing website.’’ Today, new releases get uploaded every night, and customers can order any of them online.That allows Main Street Books to better compete with other booksellers, including Amazon, the online giant and bane of independent bookstores. “Think hard before buying a book from Amazon,” she warned in a 2020 interview with News of Davidson.“Your local shops literally invest in our community… Sales taxes collected from our shop go into local schools and services. Our staff live in our community. Our partnerships with local non-profits put books into the hands of kids who do not have the disposable income to build their own home libraries. Amazon does none of these.”

Owning a bookstore wasn’t always the plan for Adah Walker, who met her husband, Bo Fitzgerald, at Davidson College. She worked as a science teacher at Charlotte Country Day for three years and then spent 10 years teaching middle school and high school science classes at Woodlawn School near Davidson. In 2014, after the birth of their second child, she took a break from teaching. About that time, she saw the announcement that Main Street Books was for sale. Fitzgerald said she and her mother had “playfully talked about owning a coffee shop” one day. Having lived in Davidson before moving to Mooresville, Fitzgerald had been a Summit customer and knew the town didn’t need another coffee shop. But she had “watched what (Summit) had done over 15 to 20 years. So, I knew the potential.”

She liked the idea of owning a business in the heart of town and being part of a growing, thriving community. “Having an established bookstore is really different from starting one from scratch. There was lots to learn. But a very devoted community already,” Fitzgerald says. Today, she employs 15 part-time workers, including store manager Brianne Wik. They are open seven days a week.

Fitzgerald reads about 75 books a year, but some of the employees read 100 to 200 in that time, and they love to give advice about what to read from the 10,000 books in the store. Although its focus is on new releases, the store does not ignore the classics. Displays offer many old, familiar books that have been republished in attractive new packages. From a shelf nearby, for example, Fitzgerald grabs an apple-blossom-covered box that holds the 20th anniversary collector’s edition of Twilight, a cult classic about a romance between a teenage girl and a vampire. Fitzgerald pulls the crisp hardback out of its lush slipcase and flips open the pages to show how the gilded edges transform into pictures of the two main characters, Bella and Edward. “Isn’t it remarkable?” Fitzgerald says of the end-page surprise. “The book as an object has really become a phenomenon.”

Customers regularly pack Main Street Books for author talks and book signings. They sit elbow-to-elbow on folding chairs or stand among the bookshelves that can be rolled back to make space. The store hosts several such events each month, in addition to book club meetings and story hours for children. Among the most famous authors the store has hosted are humorist David Sedaris, chef and restaurateur Vivian Howard, and Jill LePore, a staff writer for the New Yorker and Harvard historian. For Sedaris’ appearance in 2018, Fitzgerald and her staff set up an outdoor sound system so the overflow crowd could hear from the parking lot.

Last summer, Main Street Books was among the first to host Virginia Evans, a debut author from Winston-Salem, whose novel The Correspondent, went on to reach the New York Times’ bestseller list, mostly by word of mouth. “She hadn’t been quite discovered,” Fitzgerald says. “But we kind of knew where she was headed.” The thought makes Fitzgerald smile because, as she often says, it fulfills her goal to build a “place for writers to meet their readers.”

Reach Main Street Books: www.mainstreetbooksdavidson.com; 704-892-6841. Karen Garloch will discuss her debut novel, Stray Voltage, on Sept. 24, from 7-8 p.m., at Main Street Books, 126 S. Main St., Davidson, NC. She will be in conversation with Pam Kelley, author of Money Rock.  

Karen Garloch spent forty-five years as a newspaper reporter in Ohio and North Carolina, including thirty years at the Charlotte Observer, where she was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. Her debut novel, Stray Voltage, won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction from Regal House Publishing. A native of Indiana, she graduated from Ball State University, where she is a member of the Journalism Hall of Fame. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina.