Blog Archives
A Serious Answer
So You Want To Be A Vaccine Developer introduces young readers to immunology, vaccine science, and medical research in an honest and accessible format. What age group did you imagine while writing the book?
The series is officially designated for ages 10 to 14, and that’s the reader I write toward — but I aim a little high on purpose, because kids are almost always more capable than the market assumes. I wanted Vaccine Developer to read like a conversation with a future colleague, not a pitch to a customer.
What was different about this particular title is that today’s kids already have a vocabulary their parents didn’t have at their age: mRNA, clinical trials, antibodies, Phase 3. They watched a vaccine arrive in real time during COVID. They have questions — real ones, sometimes hard ones — and they deserve a book that answers them honestly.
All that said, this is genuinely one of the most science-heavy books in the series because that is simply the nature of the work. You cannot tell the story of vaccine development without immune cells, antigens, and the elegant logic of how the body learns to recognize a threat it has never seen before. Striking the balance between accessible and overly technical was harder here than on almost any other title. I’ll admit there was a moment when I considered directing this one to a higher age range — and then I caught myself, because that would have meant neglecting the very 10-year-olds who are already asking these questions and deserve a serious answer. The reach is the point. Pushing the book up the age ladder would have been the easy choice; meeting children where their curiosity actually is took more work.
So I wrote for the curious 10-year-old, trusted the 8-year-old to reach up, and trusted the 14-year-old to find elements that deepened their understanding. So far, some of the 8-year-olds have been the most ferocious readers of all!
The book emphasizes teamwork, patience, and responsibility. Do you think those parts of science are often overlooked in children’s media?
Constantly. The dominant kid-science story is the eureka moment — apple falls, lightbulb appears, world changes by Tuesday. Real science looks almost nothing like that. A vaccine candidate identified in the lab today probably won’t reach the public for 10 or 15 years, if it gets there at all. Most experimental vaccines fail. The work is patient, collaborative, and frequently disappointing — and it is still one of the most beautiful careers a person can have.
I don’t think kids need to be protected from that picture. If we tell them science is a string of breakthroughs and then they meet the real thing, the letdown is much bigger than the truth would have been. Patience, teamwork, and the willingness to be wrong are not the boring parts of science. They’re the substance of it. A book that hides them is doing a child no favors.
What was the most rewarding part of creating this book?
Researching and writing the Katalin Karikó section, without question. Here is a biochemist whose university demoted her, whose grant applications were rejected again and again, who came close to walking away from science altogether — and whose stubborn decades of work on a molecule almost no one believed in became the foundation of the mRNA vaccines that protected the world during COVID. The Nobel Prize arrived in 2023, long after the work that earned it.
I wanted a generation of children who lived through the pandemic to know her name, because her story carries a truth I think every young person deserves to hear early: being dismissed by institutions does not determine the worth of your work. And the willingness to keep going on an important problem when no one is paying attention — when the funding dries up, when the title gets taken away, when the consensus says you are wasting your life, when peer pressure is at its strongest — is a quiet form of courage, and it is the kind that changes the world more often than the loud kind.
I cannot teach that in a paragraph of advice. But I could tell a true story about a person it actually happened to, and let the story do the work. That is what made writing this section the most rewarding part of the project. It’s a lesson I wish I had learned earlier in my own life, and one that many adults are still trying to learn. Handing it to a 10-year-old, in the form of a real woman whose name they will now remember, felt like something worth doing.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I tend to work on a dozen titles at any one moment and publish each one only when it feels ready — which means my “intended order” is always evolving. I was thrilled to release So You Want To Be A Diplomat and So You Want To Be A Coder (Computer Programmer) a few days ago, and I’m currently working on a cluster I’m excited about, including Judge, Lawyer, Teacher, Therapist, and Activist. After a long run inside the science and engineering careers, the shift to professions built on language, judgment, and human nature is using an entirely different muscle, and I’m having a wonderful time with it. Readers can expect those to roll out in the coming weeks.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Years of it. And somewhere on the other end of all that effort is a child who will never get sick from a disease that once killed millions.
So You Want To Be A Vaccine Developer takes young readers ages 10 to 14 inside one of the most demanding and genuinely world-changing careers in all of science. Not the headline version — the real one. The years of immunology, microbiology, and medical research that happen before a scientist ever designs a vaccine candidate. The painstaking discipline of teaching the human immune system to recognize a threat it has never encountered, by presenting it with something that mimics the danger but cannot cause the disease.
This book goes far beyond how vaccines work. It follows the entire journey — antigen design, laboratory science, preclinical studies, clinical trials across thousands of volunteers, manufacturing scale-up, cold-chain logistics, and the regulatory review that ensures every single dose reaching a clinic anywhere in the world is safe and identical. It introduces the team behind that work: immunologists, virologists, structural biologists, statisticians, manufacturing scientists, regulatory specialists, clinical researchers, and the people who navigate the intersection of medical ethics and public health.
Young readers will also explore the history of vaccination — from the legendary curiosity that led to the eradication of smallpox and the dramatic decline of polio, to the decades of stubborn mRNA research that made the COVID-19 vaccines possible in less than a year. They will discover what it actually takes to build this career: the scientific rigor, the patience through setbacks and failed candidates, and the moral seriousness required when your work determines whether an outbreak starts or never happens at all.
Illustrated and written with the honesty that kids this age deserve, this book does not talk down to its readers. It brings them all the way in. It explains how the immune system learns, remembers, and defends. It shows why vaccines are among the most powerful tools in the history of medical science. And it offers real guidance for young people curious about whether this STEM career might be their calling.
For the kid who hears about a disease being defeated and does not just feel relief — they immediately want to know how it was done, and who did it. Every vaccine ever made began with someone who turned curiosity into discipline, ran the experiments, and stayed with the work for the years it took.
Maybe that someone is you.
Education and Adventure
So You Want To Be A Treasure Hunter takes young readers inside the world of archaeology, focusing on the tools and dating methods in reader-friendly terms children can understand. Did you learn anything that surprised you in your research?
The biggest surprise was learning that the most responsible thing an archaeologist can do is sometimes nothing at all. I had assumed the discipline was about digging more, finding more, knowing more. It turns out the professional consensus today is to leave most sites untouched — because every excavation destroys the very context it studies, and the scientists who will read these sites 50 years from now will have tools no one alive today has imagined. That kind of restraint, that quiet deference to the future, struck me as profoundly humble in a way I hadn’t expected from a field I associated with adventure.
The other surprise was how many of the most famous discoveries were complete accidents. The Rosetta Stone was found by a French officer digging a fort foundation. The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well. Mary Leakey’s hominid footprints arose from a paleontologist ducking a flying piece of elephant dung. The myth of the methodical archaeologist cracking ancient mysteries is partly true, but the messier truth is that the past has a habit of stepping out and waving.
Why do you think so many children are naturally fascinated by buried objects and ancient history?
Children haven’t yet been trained out of believing the world holds secrets. An adult walks past a patch of disturbed dirt; a child crouches down. An adult sees a rusted button in the gutter; a child wonders who lost it. That instinct — to suspect that the ordinary world is hiding something magical — is exactly the instinct archaeology rewards. It is one of the few fields where the question that comes most naturally to a seven-year-old (“what’s under there?”) is also the question that drives world-class research, and where the answer is uncertain until somebody picks up a brush and finds out.
I also think children are drawn to the past because they can sense, without anyone explaining it, that someone else has lived here before. The idea that another child once played in this field, dropped this clay marble, scratched their name into this brick — it doesn’t feel abstract to them. It feels like a friend they haven’t met yet. Archaeology gives them the tools to reach back and say hello. It tells them they are part of a very long line of people who have wondered what the world is and tried to leave it slightly more interesting than they found it.
There is one more piece, and it might be the most important. Children live in a world where almost everything has already been explained to them by an adult. Archaeology is one of the rare subjects where the adults openly admit they don’t know — where a Bronze Age civilization can vanish without explanation, where a script can sit undeciphered for centuries, where a sealed tomb might still hold a queen no one has ever heard of. To a child, the existence of genuine mystery — mystery that even grown-ups haven’t solved yet — is electrifying. It means there’s still room. It means the work isn’t finished. And it means that the curious child reading the book in their bedroom tonight might, one day, be the person who finally figures out what nobody else could.
The book balances education with adventure very well. How important was it that learning still felt exciting and imaginative?
Essential — but I don’t think of education and adventure as needing to be balanced like flour and sugar in a recipe. The adventure is already inside the truth. The writer’s job is to find it and get out of its way.
Archaeology is a vivid example. The trowel really does strike something a thousand years lost. The first human eyes on an object in fifteen centuries really are yours. A pollen grain trapped in a clay pot really can tell you what someone ate for dinner during the reign of an emperor. None of that needs dressing up. The excitement isn’t a decorative element a writer sprinkles on top of dry information to make it palatable — it is embedded in the actual work, woven into how the discoveries are made and what they reveal.
What I try to do is find the moments where the truth itself is already astonishing and let those moments carry the explanation. The point of the writing is to choose, out of everything that could be said about a profession, the details that already carry the charge — and then to render those details cleanly enough that the charge actually reaches the reader.
The other half is not to flatten what’s already vivid. I think children’s nonfiction often goes wrong by trying to make work sound easier, simpler, or safer than it really is. Kids see through that instantly. They can tell when a book trusts them and when it’s hedging. What I aim for, in every title in this series, is to meet a child eye to eye — to give them the real texture of a job, including the hard parts, and trust that the wonder will hold. It almost always does. The world is more interesting than the watered-down version of it, and children, more than anyone, already suspect this.
If you could take young readers to one archaeological site anywhere in the world, where would you choose and why?
Pompeii. Not because it’s the most beautiful site in the world, but because it’s the one where archaeology’s central insight lands with the most force: every life mattered.
When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it sealed an entire ordinary morning in volcanic ash. Bread still sat in the oven. Dogs were still leashed in their courtyards. A child had set down a wooden toy minutes before the world ended. None of these people made the history books. They weren’t emperors or generals. But 2,000 years later, archaeologists know what they had for breakfast, what they wrote on their walls, who they loved, who owed them money. Pompeii is the proof that ordinary lives are not lost — they are simply waiting for someone patient enough to read them.
I would want a child to stand on those streets and feel, in their own bones, that one day someone might walk where we walk and wonder about us with the same tenderness. That, more than anything, is what I hope archaeology teaches the next generation to carry forward.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
So You Want To Be A Treasure Hunter takes young readers inside the real world of archaeology — not the movie version with booby traps and rolling boulders, but something far more fascinating. This is the story of how actual treasure hunters work: the years of study, the painstaking science, and the moment when a fragment of something ancient emerges from the earth and rewrites everything we thought we knew.
What does a real archaeologist do all day? How do they know where to dig? What happens when they uncover an artifact that has been buried for centuries — and how do they keep it from crumbling the moment it touches open air? This book answers those questions honestly, with vivid illustrations and writing that never talks down to its readers.
Inside, you will discover how ground-penetrating radar and remote sensing let scientists see beneath the surface before a single shovelful of soil is moved. You will learn how stratigraphic layers — the earth’s own timeline — help archaeologists read thousands of years of history recorded in the ground itself. You will explore the careful science of artifact conservation, the physical demands of fieldwork, and the intellectual detective work that turns a broken pottery shard into a window on a lost civilization.
This is also a book about careers — what it actually takes to become an archaeologist, from the geology and history you study in school to the fieldwork, laboratory analysis, and scholarly research that fill a working scientist’s life. It covers the history of archaeology itself, from the early days of treasure hunting to the rigorous science it has become, and the remarkable people who made that transformation happen.
But most of all, this is a guide for the kid who picks up every arrowhead, every old coin, every fragment of something mysterious — and feels not just curiosity but a deep hunger to know the story behind it. The kind of kid who looks at an ancient civilization and wants to understand the people who lived there, not just the objects they left behind.
The past is not gone. It is buried. And the next great archaeological discovery is still out there, waiting beneath the ground for someone who knows how to look.
So You Want to Be A Candy Scientist
So You Want to Be A Candy Scientist is a delightful and informative children’s book that turns candy into a gateway for scientific discovery. Written for curious young readers, the book explores the fascinating work of candy scientists, showing how chemistry, creativity, and problem-solving come together to make the treats kids know and love. From gooey caramels and crunchy lollipops to chocolate that melts just right, Soules explains how small changes in temperature, texture, and ingredients can completely transform the final product.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is how accessible and engaging it makes STEM concepts feel. Rather than reading like a textbook, the book feels conversational and inviting, helping readers understand topics such as sugar stages, chocolate tempering, sour candy chemistry, and the science behind color and flavor. Young readers learn that a lollipop is technically glass, cotton candy is mostly air, and chocolate gets its satisfying snap from carefully formed crystals. These fun facts make the science memorable while encouraging children to keep asking “why.”
Author Linda Soules also does an excellent job introducing the real people and teamwork behind candy making. Readers meet pioneers such as Harvey Wiley, Milton Hershey, and Rebecca Robbins, whose discoveries helped shape candy safety, shelf-stable chocolate, and food coloring research. The book highlights that being a candy scientist is not just about tasting sweets all day; it takes patience, careful testing, communication, and the willingness to try again when experiments fail. This career-focused angle makes the book especially useful for classrooms, STEM lessons, and career exploration units.
The hands-on experiments and reference materials at the end make this book even more valuable. Activities such as growing rock candy, making edible sugar glass, and testing chocolate snap allow children to turn their own kitchens into mini laboratories. The colorful illustrations, clear explanations, glossary, and next-step resources all work together to inspire curiosity long after the final page. So You Want To Be A Candy Scientist is a fun, educational, and inspiring read for families, teachers, and young learners who want to discover how science helps make the world a little sweeter.
Pages: 38 | ISBN : 978-1972766590
So You Want To Be A Race Car Driver
So You Want To Be A Racecar Driver is an engaging installment in a career-focused series that introduces young readers to the exciting world of professional racing. The book explores what it takes to become a racecar driver while offering a realistic look at the responsibilities, training, and dedication required for this profession. It presents the information in an accessible, age-appropriate way and includes additional facts and resources for children who may want to learn more about this career path.
I appreciated the level of detail provided throughout the book. It is both informative and entertaining, giving readers a strong understanding of the career while also sharing interesting facts and trivia about racing. The book offers a look into a day in the life of a racecar driver and highlights the work involved in preparing for a race, both on and off the track. It makes clear that racing requires preparation, discipline, teamwork, and commitment. I especially enjoyed the inclusion of information about the pit crew, one of the most fascinating aspects of racing.
I would recommend So You Want To Be A Racecar Driver to young readers who are beginning to think about what they might want to be when they grow up. This book is a fun and informative introduction to a unique career path, filled with facts and trivia that will keep curious readers engaged from start to finish.
Pages: 38 | ISBN : 978-1972766156
So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor
Linda Soules’ So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor is a fun, fascinating, and surprisingly eye-opening children’s book that turns a dream job into a real-world career young readers can understand. At first, inventing ice cream flavors may sound like a job that is all about eating delicious scoops, but this book quickly shows that there is much more happening behind the scenes. Through clear explanations and engaging examples, Soules introduces readers to the chemistry, creativity, patience, and problem-solving involved in developing a successful new flavor.
One of the strongest parts of the book is the way it explains the science of taste in a kid-friendly but respectful way. Readers learn why cold temperatures can hide sweetness, why the nose does much of the work when we taste food, and how color can change the way the brain experiences flavor. These details make the book both educational and memorable. The fun facts are especially enjoyable, from the real ice cream graveyard in Vermont to the professional taster whose tongue was insured for a million dollars. These are the kinds of facts young readers will want to share with everyone.
Beyond the trivia, the book does an excellent job connecting curiosity to real careers. Soules shows how food science, flavor chemistry, sensory science, and the culinary arts all come together in the work of an ice cream flavor inventor. The book invites kids to think like scientists and creators. The hands-on activities and kitchen experiments make the subject feel accessible, encouraging readers to start testing their own ideas at home.
With colorful illustrations, approachable writing, and a wonderfully creative subject, So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor is a delightful blend of science, imagination, and career exploration. It’s perfect for curious kids, future chefs, STEM lovers, and anyone who has ever wondered how their favorite frozen treat came to be. This is an engaging and educational book that makes food science exciting and shows young readers that even a scoop of ice cream can lead to endless discovery.
Pages: 38 | ASIN : B0GX2ZW3M1
So You Want To Be A Surgeon
So You Want To Be A Surgeon, by Linda Soules, is an engaging and impressively detailed nonfiction guide for young readers who are curious about medicine. Written for children ages 10 to 14, the book takes readers beyond the dramatic television version of surgery and into the real world of operating rooms, medical training, anatomy, teamwork, and patient care. Soules explains what surgeons actually do, from diagnosis and preparation to the operation itself and the follow-up care that helps patients heal. The result is a clear, fascinating look at a demanding career that requires far more than steady hands.
One of the strongest parts of this book is how honestly it presents the long road to becoming a surgeon. Readers learn about the thirteen-to-fifteen-year path through college, medical school, and residency, as well as the thousands of hours of practice needed to build true skill. Soules also highlights the atmosphere of the operating room, including the cool temperature, bright lights, sterile field, surgical tools, robotic instruments, and precise communication among the medical team. These details make the profession feel real and understandable without oversimplifying it. The book respects its young audience by giving them serious information in language they can follow.
The book also succeeds because it shows the human side of surgery. Soules emphasizes that great surgeons need focus, stamina, confidence, compassion, and the ability to stay calm when something unexpected happens. I especially liked the section titled “The People You Work With,” where Linda states, “A doctor is never working alone.” This stood out to me because it shows young readers that surgery is not just about one skilled doctor making important decisions. It’s also about teamwork, trust, and communication. I appreciated how this section helps children understand that saving lives is a shared effort, and that being a great surgeon also means knowing how to work well with others.
Colorful and bold illustrations make the material even more accessible, helping readers picture the operating room, medical tools, and complex procedures. The ‘What You Can Do To Prepare Right Now’ section gives curious children practical ways to explore the field right away. So You Want To Be A Surgeon is educational, realistic, and encouraging. It’s an excellent choice for classrooms, homeschooling families, career units, and any child interested in science, medicine, or helping others through a life-saving profession.
Pages: 38 | ISBN : 978-1972766224
The Whole Picture
So You Want To Be A Professional Athlete offers young readers insight into becoming a professional athlete, focusing on talent, discipline, and handling the inevitable pressure. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Because the dominant story kids are handed about professional athletes is almost all highlight reel — the game-winning shot, the gold medal, the 10 seconds that make the broadcast — and almost none of the 10 years behind those 10 seconds. I wanted to write the book that lives behind the camera. The 5 AM alarms. The ice baths. The thousand quiet repetitions a coach asks for to get one motion automatic. The work nobody films.
I also wanted to push back, gently, on a phrase I think hurts a lot of young athletes: “natural talent.” The book makes the argument as plainly as I could that the athletes who last aren’t necessarily the most naturally gifted. They’re the ones who take the whole job seriously — recovery, sleep, nutrition, mental preparation, the parts no one applauds. Talent gets you to the starting line. Discipline gets you to the finish. That’s a truer story, and I think it’s a kinder one, because it tells a kid that what they can control is what actually matters.
One of the book’s strengths is its honesty about injuries, routine, and the short length of many sports careers. Why was it important to show those realities?
Because a children’s book that hides those things isn’t really written for the kids; it’s written for the adults who don’t want to disappoint them. I think kids can hold the whole picture, and I think they’re better served when we trust them with it.
So the book tells them the average NFL career is about three and a third years. It tells them careers can end in a single moment of a single race — and then it tells them the Derek Redmond story, where a hamstring tears at the Olympic semifinal and the runner finishes the race anyway, on one leg, with his father’s arm around his shoulders. It tells them Simone Biles withdrew from a final she was expected to win because something inside her body was wrong, and that this was the most professional choice she could have made.
What I want the young reader to take from this is not a warning. It’s an inheritance. Sports give a person something rare: a daily relationship with honest feedback. The clock, the score, the tape from yesterday’s practice — none of them flatter you, and none of them lie. A child who grows up inside that kind of feedback learns early what most adults spend decades trying to learn: how to see themselves clearly, how to take in hard information without falling apart, how to separate effort from outcome and keep showing up to both. That self-knowledge is the real gift of the work, and it travels with the athlete long after the uniform comes off. I wanted kids to see that whole, because the trophy is the smallest part of what they would actually be earning.
The book also has a page about retirement that I’m proud of. Almost every career book ends at the peak; this one walks a few steps further, to the empty stadium and the question of what comes next. I wanted children to understand that an athletic career ending in your 30s is not life-ending. It is the beginning of a second act that the first act has been quietly preparing you for the whole time. The discipline, the resilience under pressure, the ability to be coached, the habit of showing up before dawn when nobody is watching — none of that disappears when the career does. It becomes the foundation for whatever comes next, whether that is coaching, building a business, raising a family, returning to school, or something nobody, including the athlete, can yet imagine.
How did you approach explaining sports psychology, pressure, and mental preparation in a way that younger readers could connect with?
I tried to give them the actual vocabulary. Flow state. The prefrontal cortex going quiet so trained instinct can take over. Visualization. Pre-performance routines. Body intelligence — the ability to tell the difference between productive soreness and the early signal of injury. Once a child has those words, they can describe experiences they’ve already been having on the soccer field or at the piano bench but didn’t have language for.
I also leaned hard on the idea that the mental side isn’t separate from the physical side. It is the physical side, at the level where competitors are most evenly matched. In the 100-meter dash, gold and fourth place can be one one-hundredth of a second apart. Less than a blink. Everything an athlete does — every nutrition decision, every recovery session, every breathing protocol — exists to find that one one-hundredth of a second. Once a kid sees that, they understand why the mental work matters, and why a sports psychologist isn’t a luxury or a sign something is wrong. It’s part of the job.
What is one thing you hope young readers take away from So You Want To Be A Professional Athlete?
That athlete is not a job they have to wait to be given. The book ends with this line, and I mean it as plainly as I can: professional is a destination, but athlete is an identity. A kid lacing up shoes on a front porch, about to go outside and find out what their body can do — that kid is already an athlete. Nobody has to certify it.
Most professional athletes will tell you the same thing in their own words: the love of moving, of testing yourself, of getting measurably better at one specific thing through focused work — that’s what carried them. The contract came later. If a reader closes this book and goes outside, that’s the whole thing. The rest of the work, they can begin tomorrow morning.
And the deeper takeaway, whether or not sport ever becomes their chosen profession, is that the way a serious athlete learns to live is the way any serious person learns to live. Showing up before dawn when no one is watching. Doing the boring repetitions because that’s where mastery actually resides. Losing, looking honestly at why, and trying again. Trusting a coach. Trusting a team. Being patient with a body, or a skill, or a goal that is improving on a timeline you cannot rush. Those habits not only build athletes. They build doctors, engineers, teachers, parents, and citizens. A child who learns them through sport carries them into every room they will ever enter. The trophy on the shelf is a small thing. The person formed in the pursuit of it is the whole point.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
This illustrated nonfiction guide takes young readers ages 10 to 14 inside the real world of elite sports — not the highlight reels and trophy ceremonies, but the thousands of hours of training, discipline, and sacrifice that happen long before the arena lights come on. From pre-season conditioning and sports science to in-season competition and recovery, this book shows kids what professional athletes actually do every single day to perform at the absolute edge of human capability.
You will discover how athletes build their bodies through periodized training programs, nutrition science, biomechanics, and carefully planned sleep and recovery. You will learn how they develop the mental toughness and psychological resilience to handle pressure, failure, and the relentless scrutiny that comes with competing at the highest level. And you will see why mindset and discipline matter just as much as speed, strength, or natural ability — because at the professional level, the margin between winning and losing is smaller than most people can imagine.
This is also a book about what a sports career really costs and what it gives back. It covers the full arc of an athletic life — its intensity, its brevity, and how the best athletes build confidence and prepare for what comes after the final game. It explores the team behind every athlete: the coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and sports psychologists who work in careful coordination so that one person, in one moment, can do something extraordinary.
Packed with vivid illustrations and real stories of what elite training looks like from the inside, this guide treats young athletes as equals. It does not talk down. It does not oversimplify. It brings kids all the way into a world most children only see from the stands — and gives them honest, specific answers about whether this demanding path might be their calling.
Whether your young reader dreams of competing in baseball, soccer, basketball, swimming, or any sport that demands everything they have, this book was written for the boy or girl who is never just playing. The one who is always competing, always measuring, always reaching for something just beyond their current best.
Somewhere right now, in a gym or on a field or in a pool, the next great athlete is doing the work that no one sees yet. This book is for the kid who wants to know exactly what that work looks like.
The Actual Experts
So You Want To Be A Toy Designer takes young readers inside the process of making the toys they love, from product testing to the teamwork and problem-solving required. What inspired you to write this nonfiction book for children?
Toys are the first objects in a child’s life designed entirely with them in mind, and I wanted to crack the magic open. Children deserve to see the hundred sketches behind the one toy, the prototypes that ended up in a drawer, the grown adults sitting around a table arguing about whether a teddy bear’s eyes might come loose. There is also something irresistibly humbling about a profession where one of the recurring occupational hazards is watching a child push aside the toy you spent six months on to play with the box it came in. A job that funny and that earnest deserved its own book.
A deeper reason is that kids are the actual experts on toys. They have spent every year of their lives studying the subject with total attention. They have opinions about which toys feel right in the hand and which feel cheap. They know exactly the moment a toy gets boring, and why. They have wished a hundred times that a particular toy did one specific thing differently. Those instincts are not preliminary versions of grown-up opinions — they are the real thing, and toy designers spend their careers trying to listen to children that closely. I wanted a book that handed that recognition back to the reader: you already know more about this than you think you do. The questions you ask about your own toys are exactly the questions designers ask. You are not preparing to enter the conversation. You are already in it.
I also wanted to dispense with the assumption that growing up means leaving toys (and fun) behind. The adults inside this profession are, in the most enviable sense, people who never stopped playing with toys. They build, sketch, prototype, play, and study play, and they get paid to do it. That isn’t a betrayal of adulthood; it is one of its better versions. Toy designers do work children take seriously, even when adults forget how to — and I wanted to take it seriously too.
The book is honest about the challenges of toy design, including failed ideas and redesign. Why was it important to show children that creativity involves trial and error?
Because the lie that good ideas arrive wholly formed and instantaneously quietly damages the children who can’t produce them on demand, which is all of us. The truth is, the thirtieth sketch is usually the good one. Toy designers fail in front of seven-year-olds for a living, and that isn’t a setback. That’s the job.
When a child learns that the toy they love was version fourteen, not version one, something loosens in them. They get permission to be on version three of their own thing and not feel behind. I wanted children to meet adults whose entire profession depends on being wrong, often, and in public — and to see that those adults love what they do. Iteration is not the obstacle to creativity. Iteration is creativity.
What kind of research did you do to show the day-to-day reality of toy designers?
I worked in three layers, because no single source could give me everything I needed.
The first was the historical record, which turns out to be one of the most charming bodies of biography in any industry. Ruth Handler watched her daughter give paper dolls adult roles and realized no toy let girls imagine themselves as adults. Barbie was the answer, named for her daughter Barbara. A navy engineer in 1943 knocked a tension spring off his workbench and watched it walk end-over-end across the floor; his wife named it Slinky. Eddy Goldfarb is 104, holds nearly 300 patents, and still walks out to his garage every morning to prototype on a 3D printer. These stories aren’t decoration. They are evidence of who toy designers actually are: curious, unembarrassed about play, often working at the edge of accident and intention.
The second layer was the present-day craft. I drew on industry reporting, accounts from designers at the major houses, the play-research literature, and — more interesting than it sounds — the ASTM F963 safety standard, which specifies the exact force a part must withstand before a small child can pull it loose. What struck me there was that constraint is not the enemy of creativity in this field; it is the medium designers actually work in.
The third layer was the texture of an actual working day, which neither history nor industry publication will give you. For that, I triangulated until I could build a composite that felt true: the morning safety lab report, the hour of fast sketching where forty-seven drawings get discarded, and three get pinned to the wall, the midday session behind one-way glass watching seven-year-olds pick up a prototype or — worst of all — get more interested in the box.
What I was reaching for, across all three layers, is what I reach for in every title: a portrait a working practitioner would recognize as their own.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The list is long — and continuing to grow! I tend to work on several titles at once and only release them when they feel finished, so the order is always evolving. Most recently, I was thrilled to publish So You Want To Be A Waterslide Tester and So You Want To Be An Astronomer & Exoplanet Hunter, which brings the series to thirty-seven published titles, and I am nowhere near slowing down.
The near-term lineup is one of the most fun stretches I’ve worked on. Several of the upcoming titles have what I think of as the “is that a real job?” factor — ice cream flavor inventor, candy scientist, professional taste tester — careers that delight children before they have even opened the book. I’ve also begun work on a fashion design title for near-term release, and my son is lobbying hard for me to move cryptographer and esports athlete (pro gamer) up the queue. He may well succeed. What I love about this stretch of the series is how wide it is reaching: from the timeless callings to the ones that reflect just how strange and wonderful the working world has become.
If I had to predict the next one to land based on where things currently stand, it would be So You Want To Be A Journalist. But new titles are rolling out continuously through the rest of 2026, and the full list — along with a sign-up for upcoming releases — lives at LindaSoules.com. I would love for readers to come find the one with their name on it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
This is not a simplified, watered-down look at a fun job. It is a real, honest guide to what toy designers actually do — the years of industrial design training, the child development study, the materials engineering, and the iterative prototyping that happen long before a single toy reaches a shelf. You will discover how designers learn to see the world through a child’s eyes while solving complex engineering problems, and why that combination of imagination and technical skill makes toy design one of the most unique professions a young person can pursue.
Inside, you will follow the full design process from first sketch to working prototype to safety testing. You will learn how designers draw on child psychology to understand how play shapes learning at every age. You will see how teams of engineers, creative designers, and manufacturing specialists work together to turn an idea into something a six-year-old picks up, plays with for hours, and refuses to put down. And you will meet the visionary inventors whose toys became the defining objects of childhood for generations.
But this book goes further than most career guides for kids. It explores the real skills toy designers build — sketching, 3D modeling, materials science, understanding how small hands interact with objects — and shows what young readers can start doing right now to develop those same abilities. Whether you love to draw, build, tinker, or simply take things apart to understand how they work, this book helps you see how those instincts connect to a real profession.
Illustrated throughout with detailed, engaging artwork, this nonfiction guide treats its readers as equals. It brings the same depth and honesty that boys and girls ages 10-14 and up deserve when they ask a serious question about their future. No talking down. No sugarcoating. Just a clear, fascinating window into the craft behind the toys you grew up loving.
The toy that will define the next generation of childhood has not been designed yet. It is waiting for someone with the curiosity, the craft, and the joy to bring it into the world — and that someone might be you.
