BookSprouting's Inspiration

Having been a lover of books for most of my days, I guess it's natural (but perhaps not) that as I grew older I read fewer children's stories and more grown-up books. Attracted to the classics I lost sight of my roots. Having a daughter changed all of that. Reading to her from her infancy, she naturally began to love and devour books on her own. Christmas and other gift-giving occasions couldn't come fast enough to fill her reading pipeline but fortunately mommy used to teach 3rd grade and Estelle had a bookcase full of books. But what surprised me was that a number of books, which will forever remain nameless, lacked the literary quality that I expect to see in a book. Hey, even if it's for an infant, I still expect that it be creative, witty if called for, prosaic when necessary, and just downright well done. Yet to my surprise many works lacked many of these qualities - as if they had been written by a computer program and proofread by a robot. There has to be a better way!

Enter BookSprouting.com. BookSprouting is a result of channeling this realization into a healthy enterprise. Germinated late last year as I attended a partner conference for a software company (completely and totally unrelated), my hope is that we can attract and build a community that creates the best Children's literature available. As a community of lovers of children's books we will read and then vote on works written by members of the community. Top-voted stories will then receive attractive, sizable prizes as well as exposure for publishing. Now live in Beta, we need your help in building this into the community that we all need it to be. By next week the site will have a forum area where you can give us feedback on how to make the site better. I'm also planning on writing my first children's book and posting it in the hopes that it will help motivate others to do the same. The more stories we can get posted, the more quickly we can get quality works in the hands of our kids.

And that, my friends, is what this hoopla is all about. So check us out at http://www.booksprouting.com/ and join up and participate in the community built for us.