Photos by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Scott Dreyer, seated at the head of the table, leads his family in prayer. Pictured clockwise from Dreyer are Victor Dreyer, 11; Harmony Dreyer, 14; Sarah Dreyer, 13; David Dreyer, 10; and wife Deborah Dreyer. Dreyer is a Patrick Henry High School teacher whose lapse in ordering books for a class in Taiwan prompted him to write one of his own.

Scott Dreyer, a history teacher, has written a book to help Taiwanese students write better English.

Scott Dreyer says he worked many late nights meeting the publisher's deadline for the book.

Scott Dreyer is big in Taiwan.

In Roanoke, he's a history teacher at Patrick Henry High School. But in Taiwan, he's the author of a hot new English textbook for college students called "Write Like a Champion." (Chinese title: "An American Teacher Teaches you to Write Better English.")

The book came out this summer. The first run sold out within a month. It hit the top spot for new language books on a Taiwanese best-seller list. It peaked at No. 9 overall, just below a book by superinvestor Warren Buffett.

All this success on the other side of the planet has thrilled Dreyer, and perhaps overwhelmed him a little bit too.

"Hey, I'm on the same page as Warren Buffett. That's not too bad," he said one recent evening, sounding as though he still didn't quite believe it.

The book was the result of a late-night epiphany for Dreyer, who spent 10 years after college teaching English in Taiwan, where he met his wife, Deborah.

In 2007, Scott, Deborah, and their four children were getting ready to visit relatives in Taiwan over the summer. To help pay for the trip, he had signed up to teach some classes there, helping students with their written English.

But he'd put off ordering textbooks until it was too late.

"I was so mad at myself," he recalled, shaking his head one evening as he sat in his living room in Southwest Roanoke.

He decided to make his own textbook by typing up and collating old worksheets. That yielded a 29-page packet. He called it his 12 steps to clearer writing.

It just so happened, he said, that the husband of his contact in Taiwan is an English professor who had been approached by a publisher about writing an English textbook. The professor, Posen Liao, referred the publisher to Dreyer.

When Dreyer showed up with his manuscript, it didn't take long before he was meeting with Liao and the publisher and inking a contract.

Back home, Dreyer spent the next few months writing. Liao, who became his co-author, would e-mail him student essays, and Dreyer would correct the grammar and give advice about writing effectively in English. Liao would then translate that advice into Mandarin for the bilingual textbook.

"Even though it's a long distance between Taiwan and Virginia, we still worked as a team with a very positive attitude and believed that we were doing something great together," Liao wrote in an e-mail.

Dreyer worked nights, mornings and weekends. He would sequester himself in the basement or at his parents' house and pound the keyboard. At one point, he hammered out 50 pages in three days.

"He would stay in the basement and I would say [to the children], 'Don't go down there to bother Daddy. He needs to concentrate and write his book,' " Deborah Dreyer said.

Today, the book is a sleek 256 pages, with a photo of Dreyer's oversized smiling face on the cover, making him look like a bobble-head doll.

Inside, there are segments on the proper use of "-ing," the difference between "in general" and "generally speaking" and a whole section on avoiding "Chinglish," the mixture of Chinese and English.

Most English textbooks written by Taiwanese teachers focus on rules of grammar and proper vocabulary, Liao said. Dreyer's book, by contrast, was less rigid.

"Mr. Dreyer's teaching approach focused more on the writing process and provided 12 specific steps to help learners complete a piece of writing," Liao wrote.

It's intended for students who already have a firm grasp of spoken English but need help with their writing.

It's not being marketed in mainland China, Dreyer said, because the Chinese characters used in Taiwan are slightly different from the ones used in China.

The book has been prominently displayed in bookstores and has helped Dreyer reconnect with some friends from his earlier stint in Taiwan.

"I was very surprised and excited at seeing his face on the cover of the book because I haven't seen him for about 10 years," former colleague Hui-Mei Chen wrote in an e-mail.

She bought the book, read it and wrote to Dreyer, complimenting him on being a published author.

The book is also being sold to English-learning, Chinese-speaking students in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

"It's been a blessing and it's been neat," Dreyer said.