Selma’s Books

Second Act Stories is a publication that features the stories of older adult entrepreneurs who are participants in the Second Act business coaching program. It is intended to highlight both the advantages and challenges of starting-up as an older adult and how Second Act has helped seniorpreneurs achieve their goals.
Selma Jackson weaves her natural curiosity, enthusiasm, and creativity into many aspects of her professional and community work. Throughout her life, she has always had a knack for both business and community enrichment. After working for 15 years managing a bank, she opened her own shop in Fort Greene–4W Circle of Arts and Enterprise. 4W was an incubator for artists and craftspersons from the African Diaspora, with a focus on local female artisans. In her first book, Selma writes about her experience helping her grandmother, who was blind, during summer vacations in the Bronx. It was an opportunity to share her story of caring for a loved one with a disability with younger children. She was determined to write in a way that both stayed true to her lived experience and spoke to urban children, in a genuine way. The story is narrated through her voice, as a young girl, describing her experience of giving care and seeing disability in a completely different light.
Prior to retirement, Selma developed many contacts with local and citywide artists and successful business people while running 4W. These relationships helped her find the necessary resources to make the book a reality–from printing, illustration, and editing to the aesthetics of storytelling. Nevertheless, putting all these resources together to finalize her first book “Granny’s Helper” was a challenge. She decided to self-publish the book in December of 2014 and sold it through channels like local churches, community events, bookstores, and Amazon. After some time, she was also able to obtain a vendor license from the NYC Department of Education to sell directly to NYC public schools. Through these outlets, she sold 500 copies of “Granny’s Helper.” Her book was featured at the Phillis Wheatley Award Ceremony of the Harlem Book Fair in July 2015, winning first prize for Young Readers.


Not long after “Granny’s Helper,” Selma had an idea for another book. The second book is based on her experience meeting her long-time hero–Jackie Robinson who started for the Brooklyn Dodgers and “broke the color barrier” in major league sports in 1947. . Fast forward to present day (July 2017), Selma is almost done with the book and is planning on launching it in the fall at the co-naming of Jackie Robinson Way in Bed-Stuy–the first community the Robinsons lived in after signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.


Selma needed some guidance on launching the second book in a more strategic and methodical way. Specifically looking into determining the number of books to print initially, the best channels for marketing and promotion, and new ways of distributing her book. She turned to Second Act, a new non-profit with the mission of helping older adults with their entrepreneurial endeavors. These older adult entrepreneurs, dubbed “seniorpreneurs,” can benefit from the support offered by Second Act’s weekly cohort-based interactive coaching sessions as well as becoming part of an ever-growing community of entrepreneurial older adult.
Through her session, the Second Act coach helped Selma solidify her definition of success for the book launch by creating an ambitious, but reachable number of copies to sell. She then worked with the group to determine the possible distribution channels beyond what she had used previously with “Granny’s Helper” and seeing if there is enough demand for that many copies through these channels. In addition to these channels, she is going to experiment with a pre-sale campaign online as well as further pursuing the possibility of having her books used as educational material in public schools.

Second Act’s cohort-based approach focuses on a different a seniorpreneur each week, providing them with a framework and a set of action items to reach their personalized goal.To learn more, find us at OurSecondAct.org or sign up for our email newsletter below.

