Beyond Selidor

it very well could be! my company has an Australian branch (well, ANZ since they publish in NZ as well, but they only have offices in Australia afaik) and I know we do joint acquisitions with them as well, so it's not just US-UK. I do get the impression that the US people forget about the ANZ people quite a lot since I don't see a lot of US-ANZ joint acquisitions or cooperation. in the UK office we work fairly close with the ANZ lot (zoom meetings can be a challenge timezone wise as I'm sure you're aware! the US lot at least are 'only' four hours behind us, but for ANZ meetings we usually compromise on both sides about getting up early/late. one memorable occasion we had an author meeting with somebody based in NZ iirc who had gotten up early, we stayed in the office late, and we could see the sun rise behind him. anyway, tangent). quite often the Australian editions are just the UK editions with a different ISBN and barcode, and sometimes not even then - depends on whether they're publishing the book on a 'distro' basis or as join acq. 'distro' is just the UK (or US) edition with no changes at all, though instead of physically importing the book to ANZ it'll be usually be printed locally.

(when we distro US titles in the UK we often, if not most of the time, print them locally. we had a bestseller like that last year and it was SO funny to see people on twitter who don't know anything complain about how this bestseller 'didn't even have a publisher in the UK' but was 'imported from the USA' and they posted photos of the jacket with the USD and CAD prices on it as 'proof'. and I was like, well. this book DOES have a publisher in the UK. the OG US publisher *is* the publisher, in the UK. the fact the jacket only has USD/CAD prices printed on it means nothing. we could have changed the jacket, but we'd then have to get proofs from the printer first, and why would we want to add that extra time to the printing process when we could use the tried and tested printing files we already had, and get the book onto shelves quicker? these same people would've complained about the book being sold out everywhere if we hadn't been able to print it locally, and so quickly.)

related to this it annoys me so much how the locked tomb books are distroed in the UK rather than published locally by pan macmillan, because it makes them more expensive on the consumer end. a friend at pan mac told me they'd been TRYING to buy the UK rights to the series from the US team so they could publish the series here (and, yes, make money from selling it themselves) but the US sales team was raking in the distro money so they didn't want to sell the UK rights, and so now we the readers are stuck with paying like 13 quid for a paperback because it's a fucking distro title. and then the paperback isn't even the standard b-format size so it doesn't fit into the shelf. fuck off, pan mac. like this is not a case of no UK publisher wanting to publish the books, which I'm sure many readers believe since it's imported! no! this is a territorial dispute between the US/UK branhces of the same company.