Detailed and highly practical, Writing for the Educational Market (iUniverse, 2000) explains how to write a variety of educational products for kindergarten through high school students. Chapters cover topics such as activity pages, teacher guides, storybooks, posters and puzzles, and audiocassettes. Addressing writers and teachers who want to write, the 250 pages of text include nearly 100 pages of sample educational manuscripts. Available through iUniverse.com.

Behind the Book

For ten years or so I wrote primarily educational materials. I enjoyed writing activity pages and stories, especially those I wrote for School Zone Publishing Company. But of all the educational writing I did, the assignment that intrigued me the most was that of writing branching stories. In order to figure out how to branch a story, I wrote single sentences on a long roll of brown wrapping paper, boxed each sentence, and drew connecting lines (branches) between various sentences, hoping to end up with a story that had one beginning but five or six different endings — all the while listening to Baroque music because I had read somewhere that Baroque helps the mind solve mathematical and logical problems. One of these stories, “Crandall the Hermit Crab,” is reproduced in Writing for the Educational Market, along with its branching chart. — Bg