About Smart Little Owl

Smart Little Owl is a small, independent publisher. The whole operation is rather smaller than the words “publishing company” might suggest — most of the work happens at one desk, usually buried under paper.

We make activity books and colouring books for children. Mazes, tracing, a bit of early maths, the odd sudoku or word search. Nothing flashy. The idea is that a child can pick one up with a pencil and just get on with it, learning a few things along the way without it feeling like work.

It started small — the first books were just a handful of colouring books, and for a while that was the entire catalogue. What kept standing out, though, was how many books on the market seemed to miss the child they were supposedly for — either far too tricky for the age on the cover, or so flat that no kid would finish them. So the books here are made to actually fit the hands and the head of the child holding them.

People do ask about the owl now and then. The honest answer is that owls are one of those animals children warm to without being told to, and “Smart Little Owl” was a name that simply stuck. It fits, in the end — there’s something about an owl that says “quietly figuring things out”, which is more or less what we want children to be doing with a book in front of them.

These days there are a good few more books than there used to be, across a range of ages, and they ship to quite a few countries through Amazon. A few things stay the same across all of them, though. They’re proper printed books — there’s no screen involved at any point. They’re pitched at one specific age, so a four-year-old isn’t left floundering with something meant for a seven-year-old. And they’re sized for small hands, which sounds minor until you’ve watched a child try to manage a book that’s bigger than they are.

Because it really is a small, independent outfit, each sale makes an actual difference — it’s what allows the next book to happen. So if you’ve bought one, thank you, genuinely. And if you’re only browsing, that’s completely fine too.