 In Summer 2005, Smith and his nine-year-old brother Jamie Webb began writing "The Inventors", a children's novel.The book was shortlisted for the Wow Factor, a national competition run by Waterstones and Faber and Faber publishers, and although it lost out to Sarah Wray's "The Forbidden Room" it was taken on by Faber and published in April 2007.The sequel, "The Inventors and the City of Stolen Souls" was published in June 2008.