The end of Unbound Publishers

 A sad moment in my writing life happened when I turned 35 and could no longer be eligible for the Betty Trask Award, one I’d often daydreamed of winning. Another one happened recently when I found that the crowd publishers, Unbound, have gone bankrupt and gone under.

I got on the Unbound train quite early, being on of the funders of one of the earlier books, The Gin Lane Gazette by cartoonist, Adrian Teal. It was right up my alley, a compendium of an imaginary Grub Street magazine, reporting news from the 1750s-1800. My copy was lucky number thirteen and I had my name in the back of the book in the subscriber list.

I was very excited about Unbound, and subscriber publishing in general because it seemed like a really eighteenth century way to fund a book. I knew, however, it wouldn’t be a platform I’d be able to fund my book on. Many of the authors, especially the earlier ones, were people who already had some degree of celebrity. There were quirky books by people like Stephen Fry, novels by Kryten actor, Robert Llewellyn, and book by people with large Twitter followings like Ade Teal (which is how I first heard of the project and publisher). I was no great shakes as a Twitterer, I’ve had a couple of minor successes on Youtube and this blog, though pushing two million hits now, has never set the internet ablaze. I’d have to wait before Unbound became my publisher of choice.

I was accepted by another subscription publishing scheme, Britain’s Next Bestseller. They are defunct now and, as far as I am aware, only published a handful of books - none of them bestsellers. During this time, I tried to ramp up my social media output, put some effort into Twitter, set up a new Youtube channel with daily videos, I even handed out cards outside the big Waterstones in London. I wasn’t successful, coming a fair bit under the minimum number of subscribers needed to go into publishing.

This turned out to be a good thing. The book would have died a death had it come out under that imprint, and the process of crowdfunding gave me impetus to have the book edited, which lead to a whole new set of drafts and a hugely improved novel. I ended up publishing that book,. Death of a Dream Pedlar, through the Amazon self-publishing arm, where it’s died a death, but one wholly on my terms. I’ve sold less than a hundred copies, but I achieved my aim, which was to put that book to bed so I can work more wholeheartedly on other projects without that in the back of my mind. (Though my recent house purchase and renovation has rather eaten up my writing time and energy recently.)

I feel this new book will be acceptable in traditional publishing and, if it finds its audience, will do fairly well - but I always think that.

There was one other Unbound book I helped fund. This was a project by Shandy Hall, the museum of Laurence Sterne and experimental writing. This was Cain’s Jawbone, a detective book that is also a puzzle. There are a hundred un-numbered pages and the puzzle is to put them all together in the right order to make a coherent murder mystery. It’s fiendishly difficult and although I’ve read all hundred pages, I only have some vague notion of what the ordering (or even the story) might be. 

The copy of Cain’s Jawbone I recieved came in a box, with all the pages printed on separate cards to be reshuffled and re-ordered at will. The book that went out to the bookshops was a bound one and caused a small storm on Tik-Tok when someone bought it, ripped all the pages out and tried to solve it. As a result of the popularity of Tik-Tokkers taking, tearing and re-ordering the book, my review of it on Goodreads is probably one of my only real social media hits. 

But now Unbound has gone the way of Britains Next Bestseller and, from the grumbles and rumours I’ve heard, have pocketed subscriber money without remunerating the authors - I may have misunderstood this grumbles though. I also found out that, while in business, Unbound would make heavy editorial choices with the work and be quite strict about using their own in-house designers. As I say, at least Death of a Dream Pedlar flopped on my terms, with my design, my cover and my editing. Who knows, maybe the next book won’t flop.