Lucy Farmer’s great review of last week’s Unbound Live event, in Intelligent Life :

On Tuesday night, Unbound Live took over Le Baron nightclub in London’s Mayfair for an evening of crowd-funded publishing. Billed as “a cross between a book slam and election hustings”, nine authors had 10 minutes each to pitch to an audience who could then pledge anything between £10 and £250 in support of the book. If enough money is pledged the author writes the book and Unbound publishes it. If not, the prospective book stays on the slush pile and pledgers get their money back (or the chance to re-pledge to another book). Pledgers keep up-to-date with their author’s progress on the Unbound website.

In a dark boudoir-like room the writers took to the mic in front of about 100 people. We heard pitches, for instance, from Pete Lawrence for his memoir about founding The Big Chill festival, from Kevin Parr for his novel about an obsessive bird-watcher who turns murderous, and from Robbie Hudson and John Finnemore, two comedians who got funding for a first book—a series of letters between two gay horses during the Napoleonic wars—and now want funding for a sequel.

By bringing authors and readers closer together Unbound throws a democratic punch at the big-money publishers who monopolise the book stores. For Unbound, the pledging system is a novel way of drumming up capital before shelling out to publish a book. And pledgers get to be financially and emotionally invested in a literary project. Every pledger gets a nod in the afterword and big investors get signed editions, goodie bags and lunch with the author.

Click here to read the rest of the review at Intelligent Life’s website.

A Box of Birds, a literary thriller about the brain and those who study it, is now launched on Unbound. You can pledge support for the book here.

Here’s what some other novelists have been saying about the book:

“It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did. With A Box of Birds, Charles Fernyhough creates a thrilling plot and wonderfully constructed characters who are never overwhelmed by the twists of the story. The clash of philosophies at the heart of the novel—in which the certainties of neuroscience are unpicked by the mind’s need to tell a coherent story—is presented in such plausible terms that I should think any reader would instinctively align themselves and then be challenged by the other side of the question. This is both a serious novel and a great read.” SARA MAITLAND

“We have been waiting a long time for Charles Fernyhough to follow up his fine first novel The Auctioneer, and he has now done it in brilliant style with A Box Of Birds. Taking its title from Plato’s metaphor for memory, this is both a novel of ideas and a pacey thriller. The idea is a profound philosophical one: how can cells and chemicals produce our sense of consciousness? Fernyhough’s feisty heroine, neuroscientist Yvonne Churcher, takes us on a rollercoaster plot involving animal rights’ activists, lovers, geeks, entrepreneurs and a senile chimp. Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.” ANDREW CRUMEY

An early version of the first chapter of A Box of Birds was published in New Writing 14, selected and edited by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila. You can read the first chapter of the book at the Unbound site; if you become a supporter, you will be able to read more chapters in the Shed. The first two and a half chapters are currently posted.

There’s a great article in the Indpendent this week about Unbound’s collaboration with Big Chill founder Pete Lawrence on his new mini-festival concept to mark both our first year, and to celebrate the publication of Pete’s Unbound project, The Big Chill and Other Alfresco Stories. You can click here to find out more about the project, how you can get involved in the publication of the book and get a ticket to the festival.

See the Independent’s piece below or head over to their site for more…

 Fund a festival

The Big Chill, one of the staples of the summer season, has already been cancelled this year, felled by Olympics-itis. Stepping up to fill the hole are two new events from its co-founders. Pete Lawrence ran The Big Chill for 14 years with his ex-partner Katrina Larkin. He resigned in 2008, the brand was bought by Festival Republic in 2009 and Larkin resigned a year later. Now, Lawrence is back with Alfresco, a low-key festival for just 499 ticket-holders at a secret location in Warwickshire in June. Larkin’s offering is Nova, an arty festival with theatre, poetry and a real working pub, in Sussex in July. Lawrence aims to fund Alfresco using the proceeds from his memoir, The Big Chill and Other Alfresco Stories. Those wishing to be part of the “world’s first crowd-funded festival” can pledge support via the website of the crowd-sourcing publisher Unbound. £10 will buy an eBook and a thank you on the back page; £100 a signed first edition and a pass to Alfresco. Think of it as either a very expensive read, or a cheap weekend away.

Author Charles Fernyhough, who is publishing his second novel A Box of Birds with Unbound, explains how our crowd-funded publishing model actually works and why it’s good in a brilliant new blog post. You can read it below and head over to his blog Pieces of Light for more.

This crowd-funding business is new territory for all of us, so I thought I’d put together a few FAQs to help you decide.

This is one of those internet scams, isn’t it? Not at all. The people behind Unbound are highly respected in the literary and media worlds. They have a sound business model and have already brought established writers like Terry Jones and Tibor Fischer into print, with Kate Mosse and Jonathan Meades set to follow soon. They make lovely books and publicise them well, and I want mine to be one of them.

What are the risks, then? There aren’t any. You either get a beautiful book (and help a writer get back into doing what he loves most) or, if the project isn’t funded, you get a full refund.

Why are you self-publishing? I’m not. If I were self-publishing I would be paying for my book to be printed. (Here’s some more on how the Unbound model differs.) There are many reasons for taking the subscription-funding route, and one is that it gives me a chance to talk about why the book is important before it is actually published. (I’ve been doing that here and here.) There’s nothing particularly new in the subscription-funding model; it was big in the eighteenth century and Unbound are simply reviving it for the modern era.

What’s this about getting your name in the back of the book? When you pledge for a book, your name is recorded and entered into the subscription list, which will then be printed in the back of every edition that appears.

So can I change the name to make it a gift? Certainly. Once you have pledged, there’s a button on the right which allows you to change the name in the back of the book. Change this to the name of the gift recipient, and their name will be printed in the back of every edition of the novel. How’s that for literary immortality?

Am I going to get loads of junk mail? No. You have to register with an email address so that Unbound know who you are. They send a weekly newsletter, but you can easily opt out of that. That’s all.

It’s OK, I’ll just wait for the paperback. Er, no. There will be no paperback unless the project is funded. Help me to cross the finishing line and there will be a subsequent trade edition in partnership with Faber (due next year), with the potential for foreign editions and translations. Once the book is published by Unbound (in August, if I get funded on schedule), it will automatically be eligible for prizes and various other good things. But for that to happen, I need your support. You can do everything you need to do here. Thanks so much.

 
You can click here to watch Charles’ pitch video for the book, read an excerpt from, and find out how to support the publication of A Box of Birds.

Eventually, no matter how hard you try to avoid them, most marriages are ‘blessed’ with little ones - tiny bundles of ‘joy’ that will turn your lives upside down (assuming they were the right way up to begin with). Before you know it, you will have completely forgotten what it’s like to have a proper night’s sleep, a peaceful car journey and crayon-free walls. Fortunately, being married to Stephen, I was already well used to all of these things.

As any almost perfect mother knows, your offspring’s childhood is marked by distinctly different periods. The first of these is known as ‘the terrible twos’, when your child first begins to develop a sense of their place in the world and begins to push boundaries, often refusing to do as they are told. This is followed by the thoroughly unpleasant threes, the frightful fours, the forgettable fives, the soul-destroying sixes, the simply dreadful sevens, the excruciating eights, the nightmarish nines, the tiresome tens, the egregious elevens and the traumatic twelves. Then they’re into their teens and things start to go downhill. My advice is just to sit tight and wait for it to pass. In another room. With a nice cup of tea. Or a bottle of gin.

When it comes to your children’s behaviour, teamwork is all-important. Whether rewarding or disciplining a child, the key is consistency - otherwise they will never learn right from wrong. In order to ensure this, it’s important that both you and your partner work together. Some couples adopt a good cop/bad cop approach - Stephen prefers good cop/Robocop. I smile benignly whenever our children misbehave and he walks around in a metal suit shooting things. It seems to work. It’s inherent in youngsters to want to push the boundaries you impose on them - it’s all part of growing up but it can lead to confrontation, tantrums and tears.

My answer to this is simple - if you don’t give your children any boundaries, they will have nothing to push!

Many so-called childcare expects claim that you should regularly praise your children but I disagree. This can lead to over-confidence and possibly arrogance when they grow older, plus there’s nothing more unbearable than a mother relentlessly extolling their child’s virtues against all evidence to the contrary. Even if your son or daughter should do something you deem praiseworthy, such as painting a pretty picture or composing a symphony, just carry on as if nothing has happened and before long, not only will they develop a true sense of their self-worth but they’ll stop pestering you when you’re trying to watch Countdown. Ignore some sense into them - that’s what I say, dears.

Read the rest of the piece at The Huffington Post site…
And you can find out more about her book, How to Have an Almost Perfect Marriage, read excerpts from it and even buy it now if you want by clicking here.

Justin Pollard, co-founder of Unbound, has responded to Anthony Horowitz’s speech on the publishing industry (published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago) a piece of his own in The Independent, explaining how Unbound’s crowd-funding model differs from self-publishing.

At an event hosted by The Book People the other week, the author Anthony Horowitz gave a rather witty speech about the relationship between writers and their publishers. It was entertaining, and I agreed with much of it. Apart from the bit that really annoyed me.

Like him, I’m an author. But I’m also a publisher.

Yet his speech provoked a good deal of recognition, not schizophrenia. I agree with him that a publisher’s job is to deliver ‘story, character, style, originality, design, typography, literacy, good grammar, education, enlightenment’, that publishers aren’t (often) Luddites. That the challenge they face is a world which talks of ‘content’, not ‘books’ and which is undergoing the most fundamental change since the invention of the printing press. I also agree that authors and publishers often need fact checkers. Anthony Horowitz clearly does.

His argument all started to go a bit peculiar when he got to a part of the topic I know very well. He’s said it before, on the BBC when I and two other writers launched Unbound, our crowd-funding publishing company. And now he said it again: ‘I could,’ he said, ‘go it alone and self publish with Unbound, as Terry Jones did last year.’

Go it alone? Self-publish? A spot of research wouldn’t go amiss. Just a visit to our site would be a start.

Or he could have asked Terry Jones or Kate Mosse or, if he dared, the terrifying polymath Jonathan Meades what being published by Unbound actually involves? If he had, he would have learned that his notion of ‘things publishers do’ – i.e. making exactingly edited and imaginatively promoted books – are being performed here by people who have worked in ‘proper publishing’ for many decades.

Of course we don’t mind Anthony having a bit of a dig at us – he has every right to decided for himself if we can produce well crafted books, provided he’s read them. What is sad that is that he should feel the need to have a dig at our (and his fellow) authors. Does he really think that they need to self-publish?

Click here to head over to The Independent and read the rest…

Adrian Teal’s Gin Lane Gazette -  an 18th century Heat-style magazine, is being crowd funded for publication by Unbound. This week he did a guest post for Mike Rendell’s Georgian Gentlemen blog, in which he discusses the book and gives photographic excerpts. You can check it out below, and head over to the Georgian Gentlemen blog for more. 

The Gin Lane Gazette
by Adrian Teal

The Reverend Henry Bate was a newspaper editor with a difference. Known as the ‘Fighting Parson’, owing to his love of duelling and amateur pugilism, he founded the Morning Herald in 1780 after he fell out with the partners at his previous newspaper, the Morning Post, and fought a duel with one of its proprietors. Bate took the world of Georgian print media by storm. His articles dripped with scandal, gossip, coarse humour, and actionable opinions. Samuel Johnson once said of him, “I will not allow this man to have merit; no, Sir, what he has is rather the contrary. I will, indeed, allow him courage, and on this account we so far give him credit.”

Always on the lookout for marketing opportunities, Bate once had forty men in gaudy uniforms distributing handbills in Piccadilly. The dust-up which made his name as a man not to be trifled with was known as The Vauxhall Affray, in which he defended the honour of his future sister-in-law from a gang of fashionable bullies in Vauxhall Gardens, and gave their bodyguard – a professional prize-fighter – a beating so terrible that the fellow left with his face ‘a perfect jelly’.

Modern-day tabloid editors are being censured for their questionable practices, and rightly so, but Bate knocks them all into a cocked hat. The 1700s saw a huge explosion of newspapers and topical caricatures, and the bon ton relished gossip, intrigue, and scurrilous comment as much as we do today, if not more. Men like Bate and the caricaturist James Gillray both created and fed this appetite. The parallels with today’s celebrity-obsessed media are startlingly and pleasingly obvious, and this is where I come in.

I am a national press cartoonist and caricaturist, and I am writing and illustrating a book about this period of our history. It is called The GIN LANE GAZETTE, and will be an exuberant, bawdy, journalistic romp through the second-half of the 1700s. The Gazette is a compendium of highlights from a fictional 18th-century newspaper dealing with entirely true stories from this age of scandal and bad behaviour: a kind of Georgian Heat magazine, if you like. Gossip columns, sports reports, book reviews, advertisements, and a ‘courtesan of the month’ slot will all feature within its pages, and my own Gillray-esque and Hogarthian caricatures will dance through the text.

In another pleasing parallel, the book will be published via the eighteenth-century method of subscription, which it pleases us to call ‘crowd-funding’ in the 21st century. The publishing venture Unbound was established last year, and allows authors make their pitches about the books they wish to write to potential readers. If the book garners enough support, it is published, and readers receive a beautiful hardback copy, and – depending on the levels at which they pledge – lots of fabulous perks. In my book’s case, you can have yourself caricatured as a Georgian lady or gentleman, join us for a Georgian pub crawl or a walking tour of Georgian London, or even appear in caricature within the pages of the book, if you wish.

Curious readers wishing to know more can watch my video, read my pitch, and pledge towards its publication by going to… http://www.unbound.co.uk/books/22

This week in WIRED, Jonah Lehrer wrote a fascinating article on Unbound author Charles Fernyhough and his book, A Box of Birds, exploring the relationship between novels and neuroscience with a great in-depth interview.

In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art:

We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.

I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David Foster Wallace.

And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work:

I’m hoping it works on several levels: as a pacy thriller set in a near-future world of experimental brain research; as a love story between a neuroscientist and an animal rights campaigner; and as a clash between two of the predominant philosophical positions of our age. One is the materialist view that science has (or will have) all the answers and that ‘we’ are nothing more than bundles of nerves and chemical reactions. The other is the Freud-inspired position that underpins the culture of therapy: that the stories we tell about ourselves and our pasts have the capacity to change our future.

There have been some good modern novelists who have used neuroscientific ideas in their work: Ian McEwan, Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen spring to mind as three of the most successful. But I want to take it a little further.

For example, can you bring the neural level of explanation into the story and still create something that works as a fiction – or are you always drawn back to old-fashioned ideas of self, subjectivity, love and so on? Does neuroscience really change our understanding of who we are? For me, the only way to answer these questions was to write a novel that dramatised them.

If that sounds intriguing, you can support the book over at Unbound. As a fan of his writing, I was eager to ask Charles a few questions about the relationship between science and art and why a scientist might feel compelled to explore the world of fact in fiction.

LEHRER: You’re a scientist and a writer. My first question, then, is practical: Where do you find the time?

FERNYHOUGH: My academic post is part-time. Writing fiction bites huge chunks out of your life and you have to keep at it every day if you can. I have a supportive employer and an unbelievably giving family.

LEHRER: You argue that “by putting neuroscience into fiction we can find out what kinds of explanations will ultimately be satisfying to us.” Could you explain further? How did writing this book change your view of various scientific explanations? Which ones proved satisfying and which ones proved unsatisfying? I’m thinking here of George Eliot’s great quip that her novels were “simply a set of experiments in life.” Would you agree?

FERNYHOUGH: I’m trying to say something about how we as a species consume the science, rather than about the science itself. Neuroscientific research will stand or fall on the age-old criteria of testability, replicability, methodological rigour, conceptual coherence, and so on. With this project, I’m more interested in what the person in the street takes from the science. I start with a character, Yvonne, who is immersed in this way of thinking about the brain, to the extent that it has come to shape her understanding of her own experience. Modern ideas about diffuse neural systems, parallel streams of processing and all the rest have made her doubt the integrity of her own self. Her understanding of the fractionated, nonCartesian mind has existential effects, and (to the extent that such a thing can ever be determined in the brain) causal influences on her decision-making.

The question then is: what happens to that philosophy when things start happening—for example, when Yvonne is forced to make moral choices? If you’re brought up to believe that freewill is an illusion, what do you do when circumstances force you to act?

When I asked around about this, I realised that people do indeed make sense of their experience and behaviour in terms of brain processes. But I also started to suspect that neuro-level explanations are particularly relevant at the fringes of our experience. They are good at putting us in touch with what, to steal from Freud, you might call the psychopathology of everyday life: those deviations from normal experience that we get with anxiety, depression, déjà vu and so on. The more interesting challenge, for me, is to show whether it’s plausible for a fictional character to make sense of everyday experience in these terms. Does knowing more about the brain help me to understand being in love, or appreciating a work of art, or feeling apprehensive about an important meeting? More, does it affect the choices I make? That’s where the really exciting questions lie.

And, without giving the plot away, that’s also where I think fiction can bump up against the limits of those neuro-explanations. Yvonne discovers a coherence to her existence—something like an old-fashioned self—in the midst of all the neural diffusion. This is a novel, and it has to work on the novel’s terms. But those terms are also those of the ordinary human being. They’re the criteria by which we understand people’s actions in the real world as well as in fictional ones, and that commonality is one reason why novels can be manuals for living. The novelist has got to be asking both the Socratic question (‘How should I live?’) and the Bob Dylan question (‘How does it feel?’). If you cram neuroscience into fiction without taking care of the narrative—without taking care of your characters and their thoughts and feelings—you’ll end up with a mess, and you probably won’t be getting a very good take on the neuroscience either.

Click here to read the rest of the interview at WIRED…

Unbound’s John Mitchinson is in the Guardian today, replying to author Anthony Horowitz’s article (also published in the Guardian) from last week about the need for publishers. Read on for an explanation of what Unbound is really about and how we differ from self-publishing. 

I enjoyed Anthony Horowitz’s witty article about the writer’s need for a publisher (The battle for books, 28 February). And I agreed with almost every word. Like him, working as an author and a publisher, I talk about books, not “content”; and like him I believe that a publisher’s job is to deliver “story, character, style, originality, design, typography, literacy, good grammar, education, enlightenment”.

I agree that most publishers aren’t, by and large, venal Luddites. They are trying to publish the best books they can in a market that is undergoing its biggest change in 500 years. But change demands new ideas. And, as usual, these are coming from the periphery not the core. From start-ups such as Byliner, Box Fiction – and Unbound, the crowd-funding publishing company I founded with two other writers last June.

But then the creator of Alex Rider had to go and spoil it. “I could, of course, go it alone,” he said. “I could self-publish, as former Python Terry Jones did last year, through unbound.co.uk.” Go it alone? Self-publish? Has Horowitz visited our site? Has he asked Jones or Kate Mosse, or the famously fastidious Jonathan Meades, what being published by Unbound actually involves? If he had, he would have learned that his litany of things publishers do – ie making exactingly edited, beautifully designed and imaginatively promoted books in printed and digital editions – is being performed here by people who have worked in “proper” publishing for decades.

Then he made things even worse by quotingquoted a reviewer who had asked: “What do they do if the writer delivers a damp squib? On the evidence, they’ll publish it anyway.” We wouldn’t, of course. The irony is that a lot of people would like us to do just that.

Click here to read the rest of the article on the Guardian’s site & let us know your opinion in the comments.

Peter Jukes’ book, Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch, an “alternative Leveson report”, is being crowd-funded for publishing by Unbound.

You can read an excerpt from it here, as well as find out how to get involved in supporting the publication of the book- in return for which you’ll not only get your name printed in the back of every copy of the book, but also an ebook/signed hardback, and anything from a signed “Murdoch ruined my life” t-shirt to invites to lunch with the author.

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/business/2012/02/29/qmb-intv-murdoch-biographer.cnn

gothoftheweyr on youtube made this excellent book trailer for the Hattori Hachi Trilogy by Jane Prowse - which is being crowdfunded for publishing by Unbound.
You can find out more by checking out our earlier blog post about the Hattori Hachi YA series here.