Book ’Em Daniels: Local author strives to promote accountability through children’s books

Mark Daniels is late, something he never likes to be. “I’m a stickler for punctuality,” says the 34-year-old entrepreneur as he takes a seat at Starbucks. Daniels is right at home: It’s where he spends most of his days working.

Daniels is the mastermind behind ChristaTales, a company that writes and publishes children’s books about important topics such as saving money, picking a career, religion, fitness and the death of a loved one.

“We want to start a dialogue and serve as a lightning rod for discussions,” Daniels says, adding that he believes his books are written as much for parents as they are for children. “Our books give parents a neutral platform to talk about these types of topics.”

In 2013, Daniels, a licensed financial advisor, left his successful career at Merrill Lynch to focus on building his business. A few years earlier, Daniels launched the idea to build a website where people could upload and create their own books. However, halfway through and $15,000 into the project, the programmer couldn’t finish. “We decided to turn a negative into a positive,” he explains. “We dropped the website idea for the time and decided to write our own books.”

Using the images and characters that were created for the website, Daniels wrote his first book, A Trip to the Zoo, which teaches children about the importance of financial responsibility. “This book tells the entertaining tale of two young boys and their day trip to the zoo. In this story, the African-American boy ends up spending the majority of his money on this given trip, while the Caucasian boy tends to be a bit more thrifty with his purchases,” Daniels says. “The intent is not to slander or paint a negative image of any particular race, but rather to begin a discussion on the topic and, most importantly, teach children of all races how to save for their futures from a young age.”

Daniels – who grew up in Marlborough and has lived in Worcester since graduating from Nichols College in 2003 – figured that, considering his background, writing about finance made sense. “We live in a generation where people aren’t focused on saving,” he says. “If you encourage kids to start saving at a young age, it becomes habitual. That’s why we want to start working in the schools; we don’t think children are necessarily getting the message.”

It was actually Daniels’s own child who inspired his first book. “I was spending a lot of time talking to people about planning for their futures,” he says. “In 2010, when my daughter was 3, she told me to start doing what I was telling other people to do.”

A year later, ChristaTales released its first book, which is being translated into Spanish and Mandarin in order to reach a more diverse audience. Daniels has since published three more books. His second, All the Me’s I Can Be, encourages children to find a career they love, and the third book focuses on religion. Daniels’s fourth book is another product of his daughter’s inspiration.

“In 2012 and 2013, I lost my parents a year and three weeks apart,” he says. “My daughter had trouble dealing with that and why she didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. It’s a difficult subject.”

Daniels is filled with ideas. He has 14 other topics on the docket and a new book coming out June 1 about healthy living. A Trip to the Playground will teach kids the importance of being active and that eating healthy food can be fun.

Daniels is currently working on sponsoring writing contests with local college and high school students, and he’s moving forward with adding a platform to the website to allow people to create their own books, using the characters and background he’s already established. In the next year, Daniels hopes to publish three more books and increase the number sold (1,200 thus far).

He’s also in the process of converting the company’s e-books into traditional hard-cover copies, a portion of which he plans to donate to deserving schools. In fact, that’s why Daniels was late – he was meeting with the publisher who’ll have ChristaTales books printed within the next six months. The hope is to further spread the messages of fiscal responsibility and physical fitness by having print copies in bookstores and libraries.