Any Child Can Now Become an Author and Create Real Books

Tikatok has launched their new online book community for children at http://www.tikatok.com/. Now, any child, regardless of his/her writing skills, can write, illustrate and print single copies of their own stories and read and share books with other children from around the world. Tikatok.com provides a safe, creative environment with a unique, patent pending story guideline system, to unleash the imagination of all children to develop original content for stories, share and communicate books with other children, and print beautiful, professional-quality copies of their stories in hard and soft cover for friends and family.
The company was started by two successful business executives and moms who saw that there were no books available for children that were written by children.

Tikatok has designed and implemented several important features that when combined give children a truly unique experience creating real books.

StorySparks™ Story Builders -- The StorySparks system, invented by Tikatok, gives children the story framework they may need to help create their books. These are optional prompts which allow children to choose characters, such as princesses or aliens, and gives them a loose plotline or framework to help guide the creative writing process. These are not fill in the blanks, but instead are suggestions or even questions, such as "What happens to the princess next?" to help stimulate the child's own imagination and storytelling skills.

Design Studio -- Drawing from its management team's past experience with the MIT Media Lab, Tikatok incorporated intuitive Web-based design tools as part of the site's Studio to help children easily point and click to make the story building process both simple and fun. Children can easily drag and drop text screens, write their ideas, change fonts, colors, and insert and delete pages to develop their books. They can also easily add their own original artwork by drawing their pictures and scanning and uploading them to their stories, or by mailing them into Tikatok.

Print-on-Demand Publishing -- Tikatok recognizes that children are excited to see their stories made into real books and offers a unique service, through partnerships with professional printing companies, to publish and print affordable copies of children's stories in hard or soft copy. Individual books are available for sale at Tikatok.com for around $20 and include the author's photo and bio, making it a beautiful gift and keepsake for family and friends.

Online Community and Social Networking -- Tikatok.com also provides children with a fun, safe way to communicate and share books with one another as part of the Tikatok community. Using the Friends feature, children can invite other friends through an email link to join the Tikatok network. They can also invite others to read their books and then can join and post their books to Book Clubs on the site and participate in discussion threads with one another.