Earlier this year, it was announced that on-demand book publisher Unbound had slipped into administration following "cash-flow" problems, an event which led to many of its authors not getting paid royalties from book sales.
Unbound, founded in 2011, produced books using a crowdfunding system, where customers pledge cash prior to publication. The publisher's portfolio covered a wide and diverse range of topics, one of which was video game books. Perfect Organism, 20 GOTO 10, Who Hunts The Whale, Things I Learned From Mario's Butt, Taming Gaming, Itchy, Tasty, Terrible Games You've Probably Never Heard Of, Region Locked and Video Game Obscurities were all published by Unbound.
Following the company's collapse, a new firm has emerged from its ashes under the name Boundless (see what they did there?) which has managed to acquired Unbound's assets. Boundless is even run by the same person who was in charge at Unbound as the ship started sinking: Archna Sharma.
According to Lady Scribbledown, £657,000 in unpaid royalties remain, while thousands of backers are out of pocket, told that their money is unrecoverable following Unbound's demise. Boundless initially pledged ‘goodwill payments’ to authors, but these were paused when cash flow problems emerged once more.
The situation has become so dire that Unbound co-founder John Mitchinson, who also jumped ship to Boundless, resigned from his position last week. Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, who co-founded the publisher with Mitchinson, have already departed.
As you can imagine in this situation, digging has already begun. It was already suggested that part of Unbound's problem was that cash raised from book sales was funnelled away into other parts of the business, which proved to be unsuccessful, but it has since been reported by The Times that the company spent "more than £1 million developing a machine learning tool which was supposed to assess someone’s social media networks to estimate how effectively they could crowdfund a book." The tool was "never successfully deployed," according to the report.
With payments from Unbounded now paused, disgruntled authors are taking to social media to voice their anger and disappointment with the situation. Steven Goodwin, author of the aforementioned retro computer book 20 GOTO 10, says he is owed around £10,000 in royalties and that hadn't had a single payment during 2024, despite the book selling thousands of copies. Goodwin was in the process of taking legal action against Unbound when it collapsed.
Time Extension has spoken to Did You Know Gaming's Dazz Brown, who, along with Matt Barnes and Greg Seago-Curl, published the superb Region Locked via Unbound in 2021. Amazingly, Brown reports that in the years since it was released, during which it is believed to have sold thousands of copies (Brown says he can't get solid sales data from Boundless), the team has only received around £200 in total.
"The weight of all of this has been monumental," Brown tells Time Extension. "The emotional impact has been huge; rewarding what appears to be bad actors with money they don't deserve makes my blood boil. I've spent days on end struggling with the depression that was exacerbated consistently over years. I am proud of the work we did, but I wish it was available under different circumstances."
Brown is currently trying to establish exactly how many copies of Region Locked were sold so he and his co-authors can attempt to claim the royalties they are owed.
"People likely believe a large channel like ours means we have strong financial security," he continues. "This is far from the case - the money we failed to receive from the book is a big deal for us. I pride myself on supplying free access to information and tools to learn. The book was my first entry into a commercial product that requests money for the work - and we got very little of that money. The three authors, Greg, Matt and myself, received £79 each over 7 years of work. Being blunt, there is no way to make that make sense. I extend an offer for Boundless to explain it to everyone and invalidate us once again."
Other authors caught up in this scandal have claimed that Unbound's bosses deliberately misled them about their books' sales performance. Posting on social media, Effin' Birds creator Aaron Reynolds reveals that "Unbound's sales reports showing my second book as a flop when it actually sold out its print run." According to data obtained by Reynolds, the book actually sold ten times the number Unbound's royalty payments suggested.
We've contacted Boundless for comment and will update this story if and when we receive a reply.