This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Unbound was launched in 2011 with the promise of “a better deal for authors, a better deal for readers” by hirsute publishing veteran John Mitchinson and writers Dan Kieran and Justin Pollard. In March it went into administration owing around £2.4 million to creditors, including over £600,000 to authors, with £1,000 of that debt owed to me.
I’m currently in a WhatsApp group for ex-Unbound authors which is a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous: we introduce ourselves then tell our unique but familiar tale of missing money, obfuscating management and disgruntled readers. Everyone is angry, especially as many of them believed in the Unbound project.
The way the model worked, or was meant to work, was that authors would crowdfund the first print run on the Unbound website. Readers were buying futures in the as-yet-unpublished book. The process in my case took about three months, whilst others like Tom Cox’s 21st-Century Yokel were funded in hours. Then profits on any books sold over the funding target came with a 50 per cent split between publisher and author. The first print run was a smartly packaged hardback.
This was particularly appealing to authors with a large following like Cox or television personalities like Jonathan Meades. A few thousand £25 hardbacks sold directly to readers meant a tidy amount of money. The unique way books were funded allowed Cox to write sui generis works that combined nature writing, memoir, fiction … and the oeuvre of Twitter personality Russell Jones (aka Russ in Cheshire) to find its audience.
After the first print run had sold out, Unbound functioned like a conventional publisher: they would edit, produce and market the book with less fancy editions for trade at a normal royalty rate. Or at least in theory. The moment my book Empire of Booze was funded, that’s when the problems began.
After rushing to hand in a final draft on time, my editor sat on it for three months then, when pressed, said it was a bit long. I had to find a freelance editor which added to costs. Unbound copy edited it extremely badly, not picking up obvious typos and generously adding some of their own.
Publicity was non-existent. The blithe PR lady turned up an hour late for our meeting and showed no sign of even having read the book. She rarely replied to emails, something of an Unbound theme. Pete Brown, Britain’s best-known beer writer, said: “I don’t think I got a single UK review or mention anywhere apart from those I generated myself. It was then that I realised the model gave Unbound absolutely no incentive to try to sell a book post-publication.”
In 2017 my book won a Fortnum & Mason award, and John Mitchinson suggested we go to Duke’s Bar to celebrate. After a couple of drinks, we nearly got thrown out when one of the Unbound team became tired and emotional. A few months later I noticed that I had been charged publicity expenses on my royalty statement for the drinks I thought I was being treated to. Then, on Mitchinson’s suggestion, the book was given a thorough copy edit to remove typos. I was charged for this as well. The paperback sank without a trace.
But in 2022 I went on The Rest Is History podcast, and presenters Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook raved about the book. I had let Mitchinson know a month in advance: plenty of time to reprint. The show aired on Boxing Day and then the messages came through asking where people could buy the book. Nothing from Unbound. After weeks of silence, I complained on Twitter and got a ticking off from Mitchinson for going public with my problems. Still no books.
Eventually in April 2023, the reprint went through. It makes me sick to think how many sales I missed out on. Clearly the company was in trouble, and Mitchinson admitted to me this month that they were having to “triage” which books would be printed. I wasn’t the only one. Kat Brown was told six minutes before the launch for No One Talks About This Stuff that there would be no books.
What made this so galling is that the company had previously been free with money. In 2017 it set up an online magazine called Boundless, edited by Arifa Akbar (now the Guardian theatre critic), and paid contributors good market rates. Then in 2020, in conjunction with astrophysicist Dr Noelia Jiménez Martinez, they developed a £1 million app which could (supposedly) predict revenues based on authors’ social media following with 80 per cent accuracy.
In 2022 they took on a new CEO, Wil (only one “L”) Harris, and new managing director Kate Boulton from digital and finance backgrounds respectively. A new website went live in 2023, which meant that writers could no longer contact their subscribers.
All the money being splashed about came from authors bringing in readers and outside investors. Funding for each project wasn’t ringfenced; it went into the general budget. Furthermore, according to Mitchinson, the money wasn’t enough: “We only ever raised enough money to cover the initial run for subscribers for a specific book but not enough to cover the print run required by the trade and never enough to cover all the company’s overheads.”
Behind the scenes, things were falling apart. A former Unbound employee said “it got to a stage where I could not recommend Unbound to my friends”. This person talked about chaotic accounting. Emails would go unanswered: “I frequently asked management whether certain authors were being paid and felt like I was constantly being fobbed off and ignored. After a while, John Mitchinson’s responses made me feel like he found me and my questions difficult and annoying. I just couldn’t get answers, and it left me with real concerns.” Meanwhile, according to the source, “Dan Kieran always seemed to be going off on self-improvement retreats and writing books on how to be a better CEO.” He left in 2022.
Kate Boulton followed in January 2024. That September, Unbound bought Neem Tree Press, which was owned by Archna Sharma. This involved her putting equity into Unbound. Then in November, CEO Wil Harris stepped down, though he is listed on Companies House as a director at Neem Tree, and Sharma took over with a mission to turn around the company.
My last royalty was paid in June 2024. That November I received a statement but no money. According to Tom Cox, authors were encouraged to keep the problems of the company quiet or risk not getting paid. He went public on his Substack in December. By January he’d had enough and demanded Unbound revert rights, with the company owing him £20,000.
Other writers began asking questions. Paul Millicheap (aka Brian Bilston), who is owed around £14,000, wrote of how “the accounts department failed to engage with my requests to investigate” over a discrepancy on a royalty statement. Many authors complained about inaccurate sales on their royalty statements compared with BookScan figures. Another author, Katharine Quarmby, wrote recently, “I tried to find out more about the way in which my book was largely (not) marketed, (not) sold, (not) publicised and (not) distributed and of course (not) paid. In despair at the lack of answers I had from Unbound, I eventually put in a Data Subject Access Request to Unbound months ago. They never answered, breaching the legal limit for responses and then went bust.”
After Unbound went into administration in March this year, a new company, Boundless, was formed. Headed by Sharma and Mitchinson, it took on Unbound’s books (but not its debts). After it failed to secure more investment and pay authors so-called “goodwill payments”, Mitchinson stepped down.
Then the blame game started. In an interview, Sharma said: “I would just like to put on record that I did not create the mess that we’re in — though I am the person trying to fix it.”
Hundreds of authors are now left in limbo. An employee at Unbound said to me, “I can understand a company sinking, but I can’t forgive ghosting authors.” Many feel that they have lost the trust of their readers. Tom Cox commented in an interview on Radio 4, “When our readers don’t get refunded for these books that aren’t coming, we’re left in the mess of having to tell readers sorry, you’re not getting your money back.”
Mitchinson has resigned and apologised. Silence might have been better
Since resigning, Mitchinson has issued a statement apologising and distancing himself from Boundless, saying the new company’s situation is “morally and financially unacceptable”. It has not gone down well with Unbounders Anonymous. A dignified silence might have been better. Part of the reason people feel so betrayed is that Mitchinson is a left-wing media establishment figure to his core, a Hay festival regular with a column in the Byline Times.
He was a popular figure in publishing, but I found him exasperating to deal with. In 2023, I wrote to him to explain how Unbound had consistently failed, and he told me that the company was not really the same one because so much had changed since 2014. As if that excuses him.
There’s clearly more to come out, but it appears that Unbound’s business model didn’t work from the very beginning. This flaw was papered over by continually bringing in authors and investors until the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. No conspiracy, just good old-fashioned incompetence. There’s a book in there somewhere. Meanwhile I’m in the process of getting my rights back, so if there’s an honourable publisher out there who wants a solid backlist title, please get in touch.
