The Elegant Art of Falling Apart by Jessica Jones is a bestselling novel in Australia, and we are excited to now be crowdfunding it for UK publication.

Jessica Jones grew up in Australia and New Guinea. After being ‘asked to leave’ high school she ran away to London to drown herself in music and fashion. Life then became a non-stop rollercoaster of what self-help writers often call ‘opportunities for growth’ until, a decade or so ago, it became imperative to ease up on the insanity (although not entirely, as you shall see). Following her diagnosis with breast cancer, she started the blog Chemo Chic – A Guide to Surviving Breast Cancer With Style. With its focus on natural and organic beauty, it was  acclaimed by The Times as one of ‘40 Blogs That Really Count’ and was recently chosen by Channel 4’s 4Beauty as one of the best health blogs.


The Elegant Art of Falling Apart is the brilliant, witty story of how her life completely fell apart and how she survived. But it is not a self-help book, as Jessica herself says: “Whilst the book is full of (I hope) useful tips about how to survive serious illness with style, it doesn’t offer medical advice or quacky recovery programmes aimed at saving your life. This book is about saving your sanity.”

“I’d done the hard yards: booze; drugs; bad boyfriends. But that was all in the past. Now, my life was almost perfect: living and working in London, a city I adore, in love with a man who loved me back. Then in May 2009, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. With the help of doctors, nurses, friends and family, I stumbled through the horror of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

I felt so lucky to have survived it all. On Christmas Eve I flew to Sydney to be with Nick, the man who had stuck by my side through all the pain and the fear, only to be told on arrival that he’d been seeing someone else… that he didn’t love me after all. That emotional rejection felt more devastating, and difficult to recover from, than the cancer.

So what is this book really about? It’s about learning to ask for and to accept help. It’s about living in and enjoying the moment. It’s about freeing yourself from our culture’s obsession with romantic love. It’s about how looking good makes you feel good. Above all it is about staggering through the darkness with laughter and with friends.

And you don’t need to get cancer to find yourself on the wrong side of that line…”

Click here to read an Excerpt.
And you can find out more about how to support the book here, in return for which you will get your name printed in the back of the book, plus an ebook or a beautifully produced first-edition hardback, and a variety of other things from afternoon tea with the author herself, a cometics goody bag, and even a portrait done by Jessica.

You can find Jessica and the book on Twitter and Facebook

26 (an association for writers, editors and language consultants) has posted a great interview with one of our founders, John Mitchinson in which he shares advice for aspiring writers keen to get published by Unbound…

John Mitchinson is the co-founder of Unbound, a revolutionary crowdfunding publishing concept. He is also the co-author of QI books and director of research for QI. As 26 Treasures builds support on the Unbound website, John tells Elen Lewis why we all need to make sure the 26 Treasures book sees the light of day.

What makes 26 Treasures an ideal project for Unbound?
It’s exactly the kind of book that might get overlooked in today’s rather confused publishing environment. Yet it comes with wonderful writers attached – some well known; many not – and four museums supporting it. It offers us the chance to collaborate with readers to producing a memorable, beautiful object – an artefact in its own right – made from words and images. That kind of idea – one which stimulates excitement and offers the chance for readers to create something new and different seems to be the ones that work best for Unbound.

What advice would you offer aspiring writers keen to be considered by Unbound?
Be bold in your ideas and don’t become preoccupied with which niche you fit into. There’s far too much second-guessing in publishing already. Send us your ideas as a pitch, in your own words explaining why you want to write it, with an excerpt of 1,000 words or so. If we like what we read, we’re pretty sure other people will too.

Click here to read the rest of the interview…

We’re publishing a book by 26, called 26 Treasures - it’s an illustrated anthology in which 26 writers (from established authors like Alexander McCall Smith and Gillian Clarke to up and coming talents like Lucy Caldwell) respond to 26 treasures in 4 museums, using only 62 words.

Click here to find out more about the 26 Treasures book, and how you can support it in return for things like a creative writing workshop with the authors, a museum tour with one of the authors to see the featured treasures and plenty more.

Anonymous asked: HI I think that this is a great idea to help authors who often get overlooked but have great books or ideas! i am an author who has been trying to break into the market for a few years now with nothing but refusal letters! I was woundering whether you are also considering children's books?

Yes, we are considering books from all genres so please feel free to send a pitch for your children’s book to authors@unbound.co.uk.

The pitch must be in the form of the pitches for books that we have on our site:

- a max. 400 word pitch (summary) of what your book is all about.

- a short excerpt  of no more than 1000 words.

- an author biography.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

These endpapers were designed by Ryan Gillard and Kiera Kinsella for Crushed Mexican Spiders by Tibor Fischer, an Unbound book. We spend 3 times as much on production as a traditional publisher will spend on an average hardback, to make sure that each book is beautiful and long-lasting. 

Crushed Mexican Spidersis a set of two dark, clever and funny short stories from Tibor Fischer, a modern master. In the title story, a woman returns home to discoer the key to her Brixton flat no longer works. And in the second one, Possibly Forty Ships, an elderly eyewitness is tortured to reveal the true story of the Trojan War.

Available now from Waterstones, The Book Depository, Amazon UK, Amazon US.

photo: Martin Burns on Flickr

Matt Keay has written a great article discussing crowd-funded publishing and Unbound for One & Other. In response to some of the questions he raised about what it all means for unknown authors, we’d like to note that we are working with writing community sites such as ABCtales and Jottify, and will soon have many more unknown authors up on Unbound.

“Historically, budding authors wishing to have their work published would have to individually print out a manuscript, post it to their chosen publisher, and feverishly hope with their fingers tightly crossed that eventually they would receive a positive reply. As technology advanced, and with the advent of the Internet, it became easier for writers to get their work to a wider audience.

As time progressed, so did the sheer number of authors hoping for fame and fortune, and with the success of such massive book series as Harry Potter, the Twilight saga and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, more people than ever want to be writers.  Now, with the highly functional and social resources of Twitter and Facebook at their fingertips, wannabe authors can persuade friends, followers and even strangers to help them in their quest for publication.

Unbound offers a completely different way to get your work published. The brainchild of John Mitchinson, Dan Kieran and Justin Pollard, Unbound is a website which endeavours to “crowd-fund” books. The premise is simple. Visitors to Unbound can pledge money for a book that is only part-written.

If enough money is raised, the author can afford to finish the book, and each pledger gets a copy. “We can make books work at a much lower level of investment,” explains Mitchinson, who has already proved his literary chops, being a successful author himself, as well as a former Marketing Director of Waterstone’s, Managing Director of Harvill Press, vice-President of the Hay Festival and Director of Research For QI, the popular BBC television programme.

The founders understand the importance of allowing authors to retain as many rights as possible. Significantly, Unbound retains the publication rights in books it signs for the first year. (“Longer copyright terms are increasingly becoming meaningless,” says Mitchinson). After that first year authors can sell paperback rights to traditional publishers if they wish to do so. This method of publication ensures the relatively inexpensive exposure of the work initially, leading to a wider distribution if the book is successful.”

Read the full article here.

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

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.

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.