More annoying and upsetting stuff this week: the collapse of crowd-funding ‘disruptive’ publishing house Unbound. Quite what happened still seems to be obscure: the website has a rather bland statement assuring anyone who cares to look that it’s been bought out, and everything’s going to carry on the same way, honest… Some of those caught up in the mess, however, are less reassured.
When Unbound started, it looked like a pretty good idea: convince enough people that your book is worth buying that they will pay for it in advance (with additional goodies for additional money if you want). collect the cash and produce the book. I know I have picked up a title or two from them not that long ago, and the books were good quality, interesting stuff. They certainly seemed like a much better route to books on shelves than the average vanity publisher, anyway. After roughly 15 years of existence, they were doing more than well enough in terms of publishing books that people genuinely wanted to read: stuff that was a bit niche but not just amateurish, derivative slop nor so completely fucking
mad that no one else would touch it. There have been problems with the mainstream publishing industry for a good while, what with all the money that gets thrown at z-listers for quick cash-ins while unknowns with something interesting to say get overlooked. Unbound looked like a way of bypassing that.
So overall it’s a bit of a shame that it’s all gone tits up for the time being. Hopefully the new incarnation will clear the last lot’s debts or whatever and rebuild at least some of the goodwill. Whatever they do, they’ve got to be an improvement on a ludicrous scam like Spines is going to be. You might, however, be better off to stick with plain old self-publishing.