Just installed the /ask feature, so feel free to fire away with all your questions about Unbound, our books, our authors, and publishing in general. We’ll do our best to answer them as quickly as possible.

Looking forward to hearing what you all have to say! x

This week’s issue of Time Out London contains a brilliant article about Unbound author Jenny Pickup whose first novel, Unbelievable, will be out in March!

Jenny is on twitter and abctales.com. Click here to watch her pitch video for Unbelievable, read an excerpt of it, and even pre-order it for access to her shed (a behind-the-scenes area where you get an exclusive view of how the book is coming into shape).

A New Chapter for the Book

by Rhymer Rigby Sunday, 01 January 2012

The rise of the e-book has left many fearing for the future of the printed word. Yet, there is room for them both to peacefully co-exist, as long as publishers make the most of new platforms, without losing sight of their traditional strengths.

By way of research into the future of book publishing in the age of the Kindle, Kobo and iPad, MT has become a patron of the arts, doing its bit to help first-time author Jennifer Pickup into print. We pledged to pay £12 for a hardback of her crime novel Unbelievable, should it make it to production.

Her publisher, Unbound, is a new outfit with an innovative demand-led business model in an inky old industry dominated by the supply side. The firm’s authors, from the well known (such as the Booker-shortlisted Tibor Fischer) to the unpublished (such as Ms Pickup), describe the book they want to publish on its website - what it’s about, who it’s for - and they can even leave videos of themselves reading extracts. The public can then pledge to buy these books. Entry level support is £6 for the e-book version, rising to £12 for the hardback, all the way up to £250, for which sum the pledgee’s name may grace a character in the book. When the support reaches a pre-determined level (typically, some thousands of pounds), the book is printed. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. What could be fairer than that?

Unbound is one of the more radical new models in a sector where many existing players are struggling to get to grips with the implications of digital technology. Trade book publishing (which means the works you find on sale on Amazon and at Waterstones) was once regarded as the fustiest of industries: a gentleman’s profession run from tome-filled garrets in Soho, where making money was somewhere below choosing the wine at lunch on the chairman’s list of priorities. It now stands on the brink of huge technological change, as Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin UK, says: ‘Our industry is going through more changes now than it has for the past 300 years.’

Click here to continue reading…

Unbound: Tibor Fischer
by Rob Alderson, 16 December 2011

“We’ve been following the fortunes of crowd-funded publisher Unbound for a few months but for the first time this week we saw a copy of one of the books.The double bill of short stories from Brixton-based Tibor Fischer presented in flipbook format dropped through our letterbox and we were thrilled to see the finished article is worthy of this potentially gamechanging literary phenomenon.

Writers can submit an idea for a book and if enough people pledge funds to make it a reality then Unbound publishes it – with all donors’ names recorded in the book and special copies/treats such as lunch with the author for those who really dig deep to make it happen.

This is the second book published by Unbound since it launched in May, after former Monty Python member Terry Jones’ Evil Machines. The two stories presented here – Possibly Forty Ships and Crushed Mexican Spiders are both uncomfortable modern morality tales, one focussing on a young woman ground down by metropolitan alienation and the other a torture scene related to the Trojan war…”

Click here to see the rest of the article and for more photos.

How the Frynch Stole Twitmas
(with deep gratitude and sincere apologies to dear Dr. Seuss)

Every Twit down in Twitville
Liked Twitter a lot,
But the Frynch,
Who lived just North of London,
Did NOT!

The Frynch hated Twitter!
The whole Twitmas season.
Now please don’t ask why,
No-one quite knows the reason.

It could be his laptop
Wasn’t plugged in quite right,
It could be perhaps
That his pants were too tight.

But I think the most likely reason of all,
May have been that his dongle was two sizes too small.

Whatever the reason,
His dongle or pants,
He stared at the screen,
Having one of his rants.

‘They’re tweeting their greetings!’
He started to shake.
‘Tomorrow is Twitmas,
This is too much to take!’

Then he growled, with his Frynch fingers nervously drumming,
‘I MUST find a way to keep Twitmas from coming!’

For tomorrow he knew all those twittering nerds,
Would wake bright and early, like little blue birds
And the words! The words! Oh, the words, words, words, words!
That’s the thing that he hated! The WORDS, WORDS, WORDS, WORDS!

For the Twits young and old would sit down on their seats,
And they’d tweet. And they’d tweet. And they’d TWEET, TWEET, TWEET, TWEET!

And the more the Frynch thought of this whole Twitmas row,
The more the Frynch thought, ‘I must stop Twitter now!
Why for more than three years, I’ve put up with this crap.
I must stop Twitter from working - Asap!’

Then he got an idea!
A devilish idea!
More devilish than anything got in Ikea!

And he grabbed some bin bags
And some old empty cases,
(He just couldn’t wait
To see all their Twit faces!)

And off, with a smirk, that naughty Frynch crept,
To the place where he knew all those silly Twits slept.

Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile like a snadget,
Around the whole town, and he took every gadget!

He took all the mobiles, he took the PCs,
He took all the internet-ready TVs.
He took the computers, he took the laptops,
He took the iPhones, the iPads and iPlops.

And when he had grabbed all the items above,
He started to take other things the Twits love,
He took all their LOLs and their LMAOs,
He stole their hash tags from their little hash toes.

He snatched their Retweets and their mentions and then
He snaffled the Trending Topics Top Ten.
He kidnapped their followers, erased their Dms.
All went in his sack, which he threw in the Thames.

Then he sat on the bank and he nervously waited,
With his lip fully bit and his breath fully bated
Until the sun rose. But then the Frynch frowned,
‘They’re just waking up … but what is that strange sound?’

All the Twits down in Twitville, the princes and bums
Were talking - without a device near their thumbs!
They chatted, they laughed, they guffawed and they chortled,
They sang and they shouted, they sniffed and snortled.

The butchers, the bakers, the students and tourists,
The housewives, the bankers, the fish pedicurists,
The teachers, the stalkers, the geeks and the druids,
They actually met and swapped bodily fluids!

And the Frynch heard this sound, this unheard-of kerfuffle,
And he frowned and he blinked and he started to snuffle.

He HADN’T stopped Twitmas from coming!
It CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

The Frynch groped for hours, ‘till his dongle was sore.
Then the Frynch thought of something he hadn’t before!
‘Maybe Twitter,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a phone.
‘Maybe Twitter … perhaps … has a life of its own?’

And what happened then … ?
Well, in court they did say
That the Frynch’s small dongle
Grew three sizes that day!

And the minute his dongle had started to swell,
He looked at the gadgets and cried ‘Bloody Hell,
What a silly old git!’ and he fell to the floor,
‘What a nitwit-tit-git I have been, that’s for sure!’

And ashamed and aroused, he went back to the town,
Dongle proudly erect but his head hanging down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘But could you, at a pinch,
Bear to forgive me, this silly old Frynch?’

And the Twits took one look at this figure forlorn,
With his chin on his chest and his confidence torn,
‘Well, it’s true’ they replied, ‘that we do need some closure.‘
So they jailed him for theft and indecent exposure.

Mrs Stephen Fry’s book, How to Have an Almost Perfect Marriage, is now available for pre-order here.

Justin Pollard, one of the founders of Unbound, first got the idea for a radical new model for book publishing while sitting in the pub with his friend and fellow author Dan Kieran. “In the way that writers do, we were having a good old moan about publishers and how they don’t get any publicity for their books, and how advances are getting ever smaller,” he recalls. “I mean, friends of ours, established authors, were getting advances of £4,000. That’s a nice amount for a hobby, but not for a proper job.”

Yet at the same time, Pollard and Kieran observed that book sales were hardly in freefall. More books were being published than ever. People were still reading. “And so we decided to ask: where is the money going? And what we realised is that the problem isn’t to do with middle men taking it all. It’s to do with the traditional model of publishing, where you have to pay advances that are non-returnable. Because most books don’t earn out their advances, publishers have a huge exposure up front. That’s where an awful lot of the money goes.”

Pollard and Kieran (by now working with the company’s third co-founder, John Mitchinson) decided that there had to be another way of doing things. For inspiration, they looked partly to the music industry, and bands like Marillion who, after they were dropped by their record label, asked their fans directly to put up enough money for a recording session and printing. At the same time, they looked back to a much older model of book publishing. “Subscription publishing is extremely old when it comes to books,” Pollard says. “It’s how Johnson’s dictionary was published, as well as a large number of 18th- and 19th-century novels.”

From the yoking together of these two ideas – online pledging in the music business, and old-fashioned subscription publishing – Unbound Books was born.

Read the rest here!

How a new online venture helped to publish Evil Machines

Photograph: Jose Frade

It was only when I sat and counted them last Friday that I discovered I’m now the proud author of 26 books. Some would call that a library. The first, Chaucer’s Knight, might never have found a publisher if I had not already made a name for myself as a Python. In the late 1970s it was rather tricky for a new writer to get a book published, especially on what was seen as an academic subject. As it happens, were it not for the launch of the publishers Unbound, my most recent collection, Evil Machines, might not have been published either.

Earlier this year I was approached by my old friend Justin Pollard, a writer for QI who, along with a couple of other writers, had the novel idea of getting books published by involving readers directly. They were frustrated by the way in which the publishing industry seems to have lurched towards the pile-‘em-high bestseller, leaving many books that don’t fit the mould on the slush pile, with brilliant yet quirky ideas never seeing the light of day. Worse still, it is getting increasingly harder for an author to survive on ever-dwindling commissions. UK authors on average earned just £4,000 from writing last year on royalty figures of less than 10%. That’s hardly enough to pay for all our fast cars, lavish houses and gold-plated fountain pens, let alone food and a mortgage.

The Unbounders’ solution is to use their website to cut out the middle men. They ask readers directly what books they would like to see funded and then politely suggest that they might like to put their money where their mouths are. By bringing readers and authors closer together, the publishing process can be demystified, even democratised. Authors can publish books that would not be commercially viable for a big publisher and receive 50% of the profits. How could I not be interested?

Read the rest of the article here.

fuckyeahbookarts:

Unbound: BRINGING AUTHORS AND READERS TOGETHER!

“We think authors and readers should decide which books get published. On the Unbound site, authors pitch their ideas directly to you. If you like what you read, you can pledge your support to help make the book happen. Everyone who supports an author before they reach 100% of the funding target gets their name printed in every edition of that book. All levels include a digital version and immediate access to the author’s shed while they write the book, and supporters of projects that don’t reach their target receive a full refund.”

Brilliant idea- become an author today! 

All photos by Paul Clarke

See more of the night here.

Publishing Books Together

Unbound is a new type of publishing house. Using crowd-sourced funding, it allows authors to write the books they want to. It also gives readers access to the writing process and involvement with their chosen book on varying levels. Sponsor a book’s publishing with a donation and your name is included in the back of the book. You might even get an invite to the launch party. 

One of the co-founders of the project is John Mitchinson. Away from Unbound he’s also the director of research at QI, co-author of the QI books and Vice President of the Hay Festival of Literature. After Unbound’s first live event, we spoke to John about helping out unknown authors, the pleasure of a good read and advice for setting up a small press. 

Unbound has just run its first live event. How did it go?

It was a triumph. 300 people, 180 pledges, thousands of pounds spent. It’s a new model - like a publisher’s sales conference for the public, with the participatory excitement of an auction of promises. Several of the authors at the event, including Jenny Pickup and George Chopping, were unknown. That’s a huge part of it - showcasing the new by packing in the audience with the better known.

Each author made a six minute pitch. We had a trapeze artist and novelist to open and a kick-arse band to close, with every shade of literary, commercial, serious and amusing in between.

Would you have been able to set up Unbound without your previous experience in book publishing?

I think good ideas always tend to come from the outside and although we are all writers, we’re determined not to reproduce the same rather cliquey, inward-looking feel that surrounds many publishers.

How does Unbound find its authors?

Many come direct from authors themselves; some come via agents and writers’ groups like ABCTales. Others come out of jolly lunches and drinks in the pub with people we love, or better still people we have only just met and who we will come to love.

What do you think attracts them to Unbound rather than established publishing houses?

Three things. One. Speed of turnaround. The first conversation to the pitch can take as little as a fortnight. Two. The financial upside. It’s a fifity-fifty profit share, so if a book does take off the author stands to make more than the traditional 10% royalty. Three. The direct contact with the most important people of all: their readers.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Boy George in the Guardian talking about Unbound book We Can be Heroes by Graham Smith and Chris Sullivan:

Claire Thom, Philip Sallon and Boy George in 1980 on a coach trip to Margate Photograph: Graham Smith/grsmith@mac.com.jpg

” I don’t know who said it but someone wise once warned that, “You should have a healthy respect for the past but never wallow in it.” One of the worst things you can do is live your life in retrospect, but there is a kind of magic to old pictures. Graham Smith’s brilliant photos, most of which I have never seen before, recall a time of great adventure and naivety. We thought we knew it all and could change the world with a lick of eyeliner and a dash of rouge.

Of the new romantic moment I have always said, “It was all Bowie’s fault”, but factor in Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan, Quentin Crisp, Sally Bowles, and a whole daisychain of others who made us dream of a magical world without rules where there really was a wizard behind the curtain.

The 70s were the best time ever to be a teenager. It was the decade that had it all: glam rock, punk, ska, reggae, northern soul, disco, electronica. Pop stars, rock stars, were mythical creatures with lives we could only dream of living, but we tried, oh how we tried. It was punk that finally demystified the rock’n’roll dream, but those of us who loved Bowie could not get him out of our veins. I was just 12 years old when I first saw him as Ziggy Stardust at Lewisham Odeon, and only 15 when I met Philip Sallon; both encounters were to have a profound effect on me…”

read the rest here.

Last week a couple of exciting things happened to me. On Wednesday I spoke to someone who could put me in touch with Silvia Hussleman, the 1961 water skiing world champion from Luxembourg. Then on Friday I managed to track down Vicki Van Hook, the American who Silvia beat in 1961, together with Jean Calmes, another Luxembourg water skier who won the European championship in 1962.

Okay, none of that sounds particularly enthralling, but for me it represents what started off as a joke, a fantasy, becoming very much real.  

It’s all happened very fast. For years I used to joke that, as an academic expert on heavy metal and the British Jewish community, I was simply a biggish fish in a smallish pond – like the best water skier in Luxembourg. I’m not sure what caused it, but driving down to Bournemouth for the Easter holidays last April, I suddenly thought: ‘maybe I should try and find the best water skier in Luxembourg’. An idea for a book quickly followed and a synopsis suddenly poured out of me, seemingly fully formed: a book about big fishes in small ponds, started with the eponymous best water skier in Luxembourg, then moving on to others like the best bassoonist in Finland and the top novelist in Surinam.

I didn’t really expect anyone to be interested in my idea. I only sent it off to the just-launched Unbound in May because I thought there was a tiny opportunity to be in on the ground floor of an interesting new project. I didn’t expect a reply, but to my astonishment, John Mitchinson responded enthusiastically.

From then on, everything turned a little unreal as what had for a long time been an idle joke suddenly become real.  In early August I found myself at a water skiing club in the New Forest, filming my pitch video. By the end of the month my project was live on the Unbound site and live appearances talking about it quickly followed at the Voewood Festival and the Unbound Live event in Notting Hill. It’s now late September, my project is nearly 60% funded and in anticipation of full funding I’m starting to do the research. There’s a good chance that I will be visiting Luxembourg by the end of the year. 

I can safely say that becoming an Unbound author has been one of the more surprising yet exhilarating experiences of my life. My previous experiences with publishing have often been positive, but they have always been slow and immensely laboured. Writing detailed proposals and getting them accepted takes months if not years. Steering books through editing and production is also a lengthy process. In contrast, with Unbound all I really needed was a germ of a good idea and the support of the Unbounders themselves. 

Of course, getting funding takes work. I’ve spent a lot of time hustling to get support for my book, using all my contacts to try and bring supporters on board. It’s not easy and there are no guarantees that my book will ever get fully funded, but it has been hugely enjoyable. In the process of hustling and pitching I’ve clarified and refined my ideas for the book. I’ve tried to create a germ of a community around it. Books are nothing without readers and being forced to recruit every reader yourself is a very good antidote to smugness and superiority. The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg is about meeting people and it’s entirely appropriate that I should start doing so even before the research and writing starts. 

I don’t think that Unbound needs to become the dominant model in publishing. However it is definitely a good thing to have a space in publishing for people to take some risks, to offer new and quirky books to new audiences. Wherever Unbound goes in the future, whether or not it succeeds in sending me to Luxembourg, it has made publishing fun - at least for me – and in the context of an industry struggling to adapt to new conditions that is quite a feat.

Of all the comments Unbound has summoned out of the traditional media, the one that has stuck with me was Howard Jacobson comparing us to a focus group in his Independent column. I know Howard a little and love his work and, believe me, he didn’t mean this as a compliment. We were, he claimed: ‘enticing readers  with what they know they like, instead of surprising them, through a different kind of reading, into engaging with something else entirely’. Apart from the fact that he hasn’t - as far as I know – visited the Unbound site, this is more than a little wrong-headed. Focus groups are often grisly: people with too little to do drinking warm white wine while being forced to summon up opinions about brands and ‘retail experiences’ they don’t feel strongly about. Unbound isn’t like that and nor are most committed readers. Yes, we have chosen to launch with some established writers; yes, we hold out the possibility that not all our projects will succeed. But that’s very different from simply offering readers what they know they like (although I’m sure many readers buy Howard Jacobson’s novels for precisely that reason). We are offering writers a chance to write whatever they want and simply removing as many of the financial barriers between them and publication as we can. And we’re offering a chance for readers to become part of that process. It’s not a talent contest: we want all of our projects to be winners and will do all we can to help writers build a critical mass of readers to make that happen. This is the opposite of giving people what they want. It’s allowing them to glimpse books and ideas they might otherwise never have encountered, by moving their role from that of passive consumer to active patron. The cruelly underrated American novelist Thomas Berger (he wrote Little Big Man) once wrote: ‘Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.’ It’s the ‘not there’ that we want to help make happen

As I write this Terry Jones is trembling on the brink of getting his collection of linked stories, Evil Machines, funded via Unbound. This is a big moment for us. It will mean everyone who supported it will get to hold or download a copy. But that isn’t the end of the process. Between now and early October when we go to print, we will continue to encourage as many people as possible to sign up for Evil Machines, a book that you have helped to publish. Not only can you earn credits on the site by doing this, but there will also be new things to read and watch in the shed, parties and lunches to organise and some unexpected and rather pleasant special Terry-related offers for you, our brave army of early adopters. Only then will a trade edition find its way into on- and off-line bookshops and hopefully find an even larger audience. And guess what? They’ll be a book with your name listed as patron and co-publisher. Of course this just a small crack in the talent-splattered windscreen of global publishing. We are still dealing in thousands of subscribers not tens of thousands or millions. But it is a wonderfully encouraging start.