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With pictures to color and a lot of activities, including mazes, dot-to-dots, hidden pictures, word scrambles, and crossword puzzles, coloring and activity books (abbreviated to C&A books in the industry) offer kids fun — plain and simple. And you can find some educational C&A books (such as the ones in Figure 2-6).

a) Cool Yule! A Creative and Crafty Christmas! and b) Happening Hanukkah: Creative Ways to Celebrate by Debra Mostow Zakarin. Reprinted courtesy of the author.

FIGURE 2-6: Example color and activity books.

Mad Libs (those great fill-in-the-word-blank games) can provide good, clean fun at sleepovers. Almost any arts and crafts book published by DK (Dorling Kindersley) or Klutz (Klutz Press) keeps kids busy for hours. You can find dozens and dozens of choices on the Klutz rack, including Klutz Jr. My Cat Mermaid and Friends Craft Book, Klutz Lego Gear Bots Science/STEM Activity Kit, and Klutz Lego Make Your Own Movie Activity Kit.

You can make any activity that kids enjoy spending time doing or creating into an activity or how-to book. Keep it simple and age-appropriate.

C&A books on the market today often come with innumerable and novel extras, such as punch-outs, stickers, crayons, paints, glow-in-the-dark markers — you name it. These extras actually cross-classify these C&A books as novelty books, which we talk about in the following section.

C&A book authors are often in-house editors at publishing houses or established writers who have specific educational experience, firmly rooted in the publisher’s stable of workhorse writers. Very rarely do new authors break into this format (although it’s not unheard of if the author has a truly original concept). Another bummer: You don’t always get to see your name on the front cover. Also, the illustrators for C&A books often come from studios. These illustrators either do masses of these types of books or have approval to illustrate featured licensed characters.