MO’M and pop: Michael and Lesley O’Mara look back on 40 years of independent publishing
The couple behind successful titles such as Diana: Her True Story and WAN2TLK? Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs on what it takes to create for the consumer market
Many might think that the title that made Michael O’Mara (MO’M) Books was Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story. But that is not quite true.
Make no mistake, the Princess of Wales’ biography was a foundation stone for MO’M, the indie launched by husband-and-wife team Michael and Lesley O’Mara 40 years ago. Diana was undoubtedly the world’s biggest-selling book in 1992 (MO’M reckons worldwide sales ultimately topped 10 million units), launched at the height of Diana and Charles’ divorce-speculation mania. It was one of those rare instances of a book dominating not just the culture pages but headline news, complete with pre-publication cloak-and-dagger tabloid hijinks: Diana’s UK run was printed in Finland under strictly embargoed security, code-named “Eric Clapton” (MO’M also had a Clapton bio in train). One day, a “Michael O’Mara” turned up at the Finnish printers for some quality control; turns out, he was a Daily Mail reporter trying to snag a pre-publication copy.
A film for TV, The Biographer, was later made about the path to publication’s febrile atmosphere, Michael and Lesley O’Mara relay as we sit in MO’M’s smart and airy Clapham offices. Morton was played by Paul “the Eighth Doctor” McGann with a pre-Succession Brian Cox as Michael. “Wearing a three-piece tweed suit,” Lesley laughs, pointing to her husband, currently decked out in very casual late-summer linens and a Michael O’Mara 40th anniversary-branded baseball cap. “Yeah,” Michael says dryly. “Because that’s what publishers wear, right? But I don’t think I have ever seen a worse movie… Brian Cox never seems to mention it when he talks about his career.”
Part of the reason MO’M could handle a global mega-smash a few scant years after launch was it was accustomed to hits from the off. In 1985, Michael quit his deputy chairman role at Weidenfeld & Nicolson “in a sudden pique”, partially because he was frustrated at boss George Weidenfeld’s disdain for certain types of commercial publishing. Lesley, then foreign rights director at Orbis Publishing (the two had met when both working for packager Rainbird), saw it as an opportunity. Michael says: “Rather than saying, ‘How are we going to pay the mortgage?’ she mentioned a few people who had started indies around that time and said: ‘If those idiots can [go out on their own], so can you.’”
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The list’s first foray was of a type that Weidenfeld would not touch: a photography book on the Queen Mother linked to an Independent Television News documentary, picked up through a contact at the television studio who needed the title turned around in two months. Michael says: “It was a hell of a piece of luck and led to a whole lot of other bits of luck.” The Queen Mother book was a number one bestseller, a success repeated with several royal follow ups, including, in delicious irony, In Person: The Prince and Princess of Wales, which centred on the happily-ever-after marriage of Charles and Diana.Lesley says: “For our 40th, it has been interesting looking back at our publishing programme from day one, because we’ve always been unashamedly commercial and we’ve always published things that people are looking for. So, the first few years it was the royals, then we did the first real big book on text messaging [2000’s WAN2TLK? Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs], The Little Book of Sudoku, adult colouring books…” Michael picks up the thread: “We might not set the trend – The Little Book of Sudoku was hardly the first sudoku book, but we ended up selling nearly 600,000 copies – so we do a really good job at following.”
While the public at large might associate MO’M with high-profile life stories (Morton’s Monica Lewinsky authorised biography, Monica’s Story, had near-Diana-level media scrutiny) or memoirs (Roger Moore’s My Word Is My Bond), the bread-and-butter – particularly in the 2020s – has been durable, week-in, week-out backlist across adult hobby, crafts, humour, quizzes, history, gift and children’s non-fiction under its Buster Books imprint. Thus far in 2025, MO’M has been led by puzzle and kids’ activity maestro Gareth Moore, who is responsible for £1 in every £5 of the publisher’s £3.9m in value sales through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, including its top two sellers: Secret Code Games for Clever Kids and Murder Mystery Club Puzzle Book, the latter written with Laura Jayne Ayres.
It has been interesting looking back at our publishing programme from day one, because we’ve always been unashamedly commercial and we’ve always published things that people are looking for
New wrinkles in the past year include a new Formula 1 list, such as Giles Richards’ F1 Racing Confidential: Inside Stories from the World of Formula One, and there has been some of that astute trend following in its Coco Wyo-esque Cute/Cool Toddler Colouring series. Although, it should be noted the first of MO’M’s colouring books in this space were published long before Coco Wyo was a glint in Penguin Random House’s eye.
For the past three years, MO’M has had a lucrative LEGO licensing deal (20.1% of its 2025 TCM takings come from the series) via an arrangement with a Polish publisher. This can be tricky as, if a title takes off, reorders may be dependent on whether LEGO is still manufacturing the figurines that come with the books. Michael says: “But it’s really fun. And it is ironic that through LEGO we have a licence to sell all these brands – Star Wars, Batman, Superman, Harry Potter. How comical is that? I mean, Bloomsbury must be thrilled.”
LEGO leads to a discussion around costs of bringing books to market. It is not the printing but the shipping that has been the bugbear, the O’Maras say, giving an example of the price of sending a title from its printers in China rising from about 10p a copy to its current £1 per unit over the course of just a few years. And there is the uncertainty, Lesley says: “It used to be unheard of that you didn’t know exactly what the shipping was going to cost, because you’d get a quote and that was it. But rates are fluctuating so fast, you ask [the production department] what the costs will be and they say they don’t know. So, we have to estimate and we tend to estimate high.”
Michael continues: “You are cautious on the high side because once you’ve quoted the customer a deal – for a product with the retail price printed on the book – you can’t suddenly say: ‘Oh, sorry, the shipping has gone up by 50p.’ It’s a bloody nuisance. Otherwise, the more general worry is: will Trump, and his country, so utterly fall out with China that we will no longer be able to print there?”
They admit the retail market is difficult, with high-street shops and the supermarkets cutting back, though MO’M has had significant wins with The Works and WHSmith Travel, the latter of which made a hit of Natasha Tidd’s A Short History of the World in 50 Lies. Given all that, MO’M is on a roll, with its last filing to Companies House showing pre-tax profits of nearly £500,000 on turnover of £9.2m. So, what is the secret? “You have to constantly look to different places,” Lesley says. “Internationally, one year the hot territory might be Brazil’s, the next year’s China, maybe France. And in the UK, we are always looking for new customers.”
