Alexander Gordon Smith is a founder of Egg Box Publishing, a small press that has featured the works of groundbreaking new writers, ranging from Richard Evans to Ramona Herdman and Andre Mangeot to Martin Figura. "By this time," Smith wrote in a biographical piece published on his homepage, he was "broke after funding so many collections ... and stepped aside to let long-time friend, poet and publisher Nathan Hamilton into the captain's chair. Since then Egg Box has gone from strength to strength, publishing work by authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clark, Rose Tremain and George Szirtes." After leaving Egg Box, Smith created his own editorial services company, called Box of Words, for which he "wrote literally hundreds of articles, short stories and books ranging from Scooby …show more content…
In the first volume the two are recruited to work for a year at Saint Solutions, a company run by the reclusive Ebenezer Saint. The young people at first see their year at Saint Solutions as a great opportunity, but they soon come to realize that Ebenezer Saint has a hidden agenda: far from being a philanthropic sort who wants to help humankind, he wants to destroy the world and recreate it as a planet populated only by clones ruled by his machines. Nate and Cat (and their sidekick robot, Clint) set out to foil Saint's plans and to destroy the evil inventor before he can complete his evil plan. The Inventors, which Smith wrote in company with his eleven-year-old brother, Jamie Webb, was nominated for the Wow Factor competition run by the publisher Faber and the bookstore chain Waterstone's, and even though it did not win first prize, was picked by the publisher for publication. It quickly won widespread popularity and was hailed as a potential successor to J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter"