The Queenstown musician and writer has sold nearly half a million children's books since 2009's award-winning, bestselling The Wonky Donkey.
His fifth effort, Square Eyes, will arrive in bookstores on October 1 and, like the others, has a CD with a song of the same name.
Smith said he wrote the ''upbeat and dancey'' song four years ago and had performed it for thousands of children, honing its lyrics, length and delivery in response to their reactions.
The book was the result of ''a song and a story coming together'' - a combination of words and music that came alive for an audience at a gig and for a child reading alone or with a parent.
Square Eyes was about a panda that sat around all day watching television, and was aimed at ''trying to convince kids to get off the couch''.
The other characters were a Rastafarian bee, an owl, a lemur, a guinea pig with an iPad and a tortoise.
''To get ideas, we did a Google search and punched in 'lazy animals'.''
By ''we'', he means his collaboration with the book's Arrowtown-based illustrator, Scott Tulloch.
The pair first joined forces for last year's My Daddy Ate an Apple.
Smith said he had seen Tulloch's work as an illustrator and a children's author in his own right, and after telling publisher Scholastic he was keen to work with him, found out he lived nearby.
''If that's not the gods speaking, I don't know what is.''
Smith grew up in Queenstown and moved back to the resort three years ago.
He typically spends four months of the year touring, and has just returned from a 22-day tour of eastern Australia.
He will launch the book with a gig and reading in Queenstown in the last week of September, and then embark on a tour of Otago and Southland to coincide with the coming school holidays.
