Aussie rules: how presses Five Mile and Smith Street are reversing the flow from the UK
Australian kids’ houses Five Mile Press and Smith Street Books recently announced moves to expand their UK footprints. Bosses Fiona Horman and Paul McNally tell Heloise Wood about an Antipodean British invasion
About a year ago, Fiona Horman – who has led Australia’s Five Mile for the past eight years – thought she needed to shake things up.
“I decided, let’s look at really getting into the UK properly,” Horman tells me over Zoom, 10,000-plus miles away in the south-eastern state of Victoria, as her pet Cavoodle (known as a Cavapoo in Britain) wanders in and out of shot. The house had long used the US-based Independent Publishers Group to export and sell rights into the UK but is now changing tack to go direct via wholesalers Gardners.
Of course, this counters a lot of the usual publishing traffic, as the content generally flows from the UK to its Commonwealth partner. But Horman says the move made sense for Five Mile, not least culturally: “The English and Australians have quite similar tastes – not in all things, but most things. And we felt that we have some great backlist titles and we create about 100 new books each year… it was the right opportunity and timing.”
Five Mile launched 35 years ago and has undergone various iterations: launching as an independent to being acquired by Bonnier in 2016 and then sold off a mere two years later to entertainment firm Regency Media. Its wheelhouse is in the board, colouring and picture-books space, working with local Australian creators along with international licences such as Zootopia, Disney Doorables and ZURU Smashers.
‘You have retailers in the UK that want the books for practically nothing. Well, I have retailers in Australia that want the books for nothing’ – Fiona Horman, Five Mile Press
Horman likes to keep the business streamlined: “We do not come to London Book Fair (LBF); we prefer Bologna, as we feel that that’s more focused. We only have eight staff and we do sell throughout the world. So we sell in America, we sell to the big box stores in America as well. And we license our content, so, we sell to the big box stores in America as well… We’re sort of owning the board-book space at the moment.”
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But Horman notes that the market across both Australia and the UK is tough. “It’s competitive in Britain; it’s competitive in Australia. You have retailers in the UK that want the books for practically nothing. Well, I have retailers in Australia that want the books for nothing. There are idiosyncrasies in the markets because Christmas is our summer. But we produce snowy Christmas books anyway. But we need to careful: we had a book for the UK that we were looking at putting a polar bear on the front, but that wouldn’t sell for Australia… So, it’s just those little things you’ve got to be mindful of when serving both markets.”
Another difference is the colour palette, as Australian book buyers have traditionally favoured bolder colours, while the UK shades towards muted pastels. Five Mile’s illustration styles have changed, moving away from having more large-eyed characters. “But there are global trends in illustration… That’s why it’s good to go to Bologna to see what everyone else is actually doing.”
On artificial intelligence, Horman admits to “dabbling” but says: “We’ve played around with it just to see if we could get a book written very quickly. But the illustrations are just not right. They end up looking cheap and nasty.”
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Smith Street kids
Five Mile announced its intentions to enter the UK last September, and in the same month Aussie indie Smith Street Books declared it would open a children’s imprint, Little Smith, partially with a view to exploring the British kids’ market.
Managing director Paul McNally founded the company as the only employee 11 years ago, focusing on high-end design titles, in particular cookbooks. He named it Smith Street after the road where the office resides in Melbourne and its titles have always been distributed in the UK, currently by Thames & Hudson.
McNally says, over Zoom: “We started with 16 titles when we first went to market in 2016 and have grown organically from there, always doing trade illustrated books, a mix of subjects including cooking or pop culture, but always with that eye on high production values and design. We can’t afford to scoop up those high-profile authors. So, we compete on creating beautiful, evocative content – which is kind of how we’ve ended up publishing into the kids’ book space.”
McNally, who first cut his publishing teeth at the now defunct UK branch of New Holland, has always been focused on global appeal. “Everything that we published from the very beginning had a life internationally,” he says. “We don’t do anything that’s specifically Australian content, as that’s obviously not going to work elsewhere.”
‘Everything we have published had a life internationally. We don’t do specifically Australian content, as that’s obviously not going to work elsewhere’ – Paul McNally, Smith Street Books
The aims for Little Smith are to “grow organically and with integrity”, says McNally, who describes the choice to venture into children’s publishing as “an organic process”. He adds: “So for the first year, 2026, we’re launching six titles under the imprint, which is a range of big titles, including natural history titles. Next year, we’re looking to grow to 10 titles. But we’re not planning on getting to 100 titles in the next three years; we just want to kind of keep the list tight, design-led with high production values.”
The headcount might also expand beyond the current nine-strong roster: “There is an ambition to grow the Little Smith list and that will probably include staff.”
In terms of the changes over the decade since launching, McNally says: “I think early on we were very reactive and we were kind of pumping out books very quickly depending on whatever trends were happening. Now we’ve slowed down and we’re a little bit more sensitive to the market and a bit more cautious.
“[Another] big change of the decade has been getting our books into places that aren’t necessarily traditional bookstores. So gift retailers, museums and galleries, but also getting into those homeware stores now taking books. The other change is we have increasingly produced more special editions for particular retailers.”
McNally travels to Frankfurt each year and has gone to LBF a few times. Now, he has his sights set on Bologna. Though he suggests that Little Smith might be too little just now: [It’s maybe] not enough to turn up to Bologna with six titles… I can’t justify an amazing trip to Italy with that but we have ambitions to go when we have a more complete list.”
He adds with a determined glint in his eye: “Yes, take me to Bologna – next year.”
