Welcome to our blog!

Hello, world!

For those of you who are meeting us for the first time, we are the staff of the Autism Society of NC Bookstore, we being Darla, Dana, and Hope. As you can probably gather from our name, the bookstore is part of the Autism Society of NC (ASNC). However, we serve a much larger audience in our capacity as the world's largest nonprofit autism-specific bookstore. We have customers all over the world. (As you can see, M., our bookstore clerk with ASD, has enjoyed putting up flags marking all the overseas locations.)

We have a very large selection of books (at last count 550+ titles) from many different publishers and authors, and between the three of us on staff, we have read every one of them, so we can be sure our selection is up-to-date, informative, and truly helpful to our customers. We encourage customers to contact us for help and advice, via email (books(AT)autismsociety-nc.org) or phone (919-743-0204), M-F, 8am-5pm EST.

Why did we start a blog?

First, we think this is an excellent way to better connect with our customers. We do send out email newsletters each month about new books that have been added to the store (email us if you'd like to be added), but this blog will offer us a way to provide more varied news, such as new books, book awards, and bookstore events, in a more regularly updated way.

Another reason is that we want to be able to connect more personally with our customers and fellow autism book readers. Here at the store, we write our own book descriptions on the website, so you can be sure they are as complete and accurate as possible, but that's not really the right place to say what we personally think about the books. We read books about autism every day. Some of them cover a lot of the same ground, but others make us read bits out loud to each other; make us say, "Yes, exactly! Why haven't more people written about this?"; make us want to give copies to everyone we know. But unless people called and asked us about them, we couldn't really express our excitement about these books properly. Hence, a blog, where you can get the inside scoop on what makes professional, experienced autism readers sit up and take notice.

And finally, we'd like to have a better forum for dialogue with our customers. We welcome your comments and questions, and we are always willing to assist you in any way we can.

So, welcome! We hope to hear from you.