NEW YORK—Recalling how his best-selling mathematics primer had struggled to garner any attention from top textbook agents, author Bruce Gallagher confirmed Friday that his runaway blockbuster textbook, Introduction To Algebra, had been rejected by a dozen publishers before finally being picked up. “All the big houses passed, saying the whole young-adult mathematics genre was oversaturated, but Pearson Education took a chance on me and it changed my life,” said Gallagher, who spent seven years working as a barista while writing his first draft, crafting word problems and weaving instructive narratives about binomials during evenings and weekends. “When the rejection letters from Scholastic or McGraw-Hill began to stack up, I naturally thought about quitting, but I knew that what I had to say about factoring quadratics was something that needed to be heard. Luckily, Pearson shared my vision about letters representing numbers in formulas, and now Intro is on its third edition in two countries and I just signed a two-workbook deal.” When asked what advice he would offer aspiring young math textbook authors, Gallagher said the only secret was to speak one’s own truth concerning slope-intercept forms.

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