With the collapse of U.K. crowdfunding publisher Unbound leaving a trail of unpaid authors, suppliers, and industry partners, its successor company, Boundless Publishing Group, will likely struggle to convince stakeholders it can survive where its predecessor failed.

Unbound, once heralded as an innovative alternative to traditional publishing, filed for bankruptcy in March after losing approximately £9 million for shareholders (revised down from initial calculations of £30.4 million) and owing an estimated £2.4 million to creditors, according to the bankruptcy administrator reports. The company was sold through a pre-pack administration for just £50,000 to Boundless Publishing Group, led by CEO Archna Sharma and cofounder John Mitchinson.

But Mitchinson has since resigned from the company, and in an email to authors last week, Sharma announced that Boundless would suspend "goodwill payments" to cover Unbound's past debts, citing cash flow constraints. The decision affects 238 authors and agents owed £657,000, nearly 8,000 website customers who pre-ordered books owed £391,000, and other trade creditors owed £829,000.

"We simply do not have the cash at the moment to make further historic goodwill payments," Sharma wrote. "What cash we have is focused on paying the salaries of our employees, ensuring our current committed publishing program is a success, and ensuring all royalties arising from the inception of this new company are paid on time."

In an interview with PW, Sharma emphasized that she inherited Unbound's problems rather than caused them. "I would just like to put on record that I did not create the mess that we're in, though I am the person trying to fix it,” she said. “The only way that we can fix it is if we can keep our business going and move ahead.”

Sharma, a former investment banker and MD, joined as CEO in January after Unbound acquired her company Neem Tree Press in September last year. She said the acquisition was structured as a stock transaction with no cash changing hands but rather Sharma investing “a substantial amount of new money" into Unbound at the time, as part of a larger funding round the company was conducting.

"If I had known what I knew later, I would obviously have not done the deal," Sharma admitted. "Was my due diligence faulty? Was I just misreading the tea leaves because I was keen to sell? I was supposed to sell and go down to two days a week and get paid for my services.”

Instead, by late 2024, Sharma said it became clear "there was a significant burden of liabilities that I had not appreciated" with credit lines "basically maxed out." The board asked her to take charge and attempt a turnaround.

"We contacted every creditor under the earth that we could possibly think of and tried to basically say, 'Hey, we're going to go out and raise funds,' " she explained. "We were almost there. We were literally almost there, and then things didn't pan out."

Unbound’s fatal flaw

Sharma characterized Unbound's crowdfunding model as fundamentally flawed, saying that Boundless has "moved away from the old Unbound operational model, that did not work, to a more traditional publishing model."

Under the crowdfunding system, funds were taken in from supporters but there's nothing in the contracts that indicated that funds needed to be sequestered. This meant customer pre-order money could be used for general business operations rather than being held in escrow for specific book fulfillment.

Despite some notable successes—including the viral TikTok hit Cain's Jawbone, which sold over half a million copies and generated an estimated £3 million in gross revenue—the underlying business model couldn't sustain profitability. The pandemic too proved challenging.

"The landscape is littered with [failed publishers]," Sharma noted. "It's already a very tight-margin business. I think you had actually probably a much higher set of overheads than you probably should have in this business." She asserts that there was no malfeasance at work and that the company was “very badly mismanaged.”

The fallout has extended beyond authors to industry service providers who worked with Unbound. Emily Cook, president of Cursor Literary, a marketing services firm for international publishers, said her company is still owed approximately $8,000 for advertising and promotional expenses they fronted for Unbound.

"In 2023, they asked us to book several ads in regional holiday guides—PNBA, Mountains and Plains, CALIBA—and cited trouble with their bank account's ability to make international payments, and asked us to front the money on our credit card," Cook said. "We still have not been paid back for those ads, nor have we been paid for almost $1,000 worth of postage for books we sent on their behalf to media and Consortium reps."

Cook questioned whether Boundless understands the reputational damage in the tight-knit U.S. independent bookselling community. "Do they really want to start their new company off by screwing over authors and the individuals who paid for their regional holiday ads two years ago?" she asked, noting that many of Unbound's successes, especially Cain's Jawbone, were driven by independent bookstore support.

Challenges ahead

All 18 Unbound employees initially transferred to Boundless, but many have left the company. Sharma confirmed that "not everyone's resigned" but acknowledged that many members of the team have resigned. Those recently departing the company include sales director Gemma Elizabeth Davis, marketing manager Divia Kainth, who came to the company from Neem Tree, as well as the head of rights, the communications director, the head of finance and three editors.

Sharma characterized the departures as natural given the circumstances. "It's a great team, and I think that they'll all find very good jobs," she said. She added, "The team that's left is fantastic, really clever people, very smart people," though she declined to specify exact headcount numbers. "It's small, but it's no smaller than you'd find at other [publishers]. A small team can work extremely efficiently."

One former employee of the company shared that they had lost faith in the management's turnaround plan, prompting them to leave the company. "Those of us who resigned all did so because of the erratic leadership and the new CEO's about-turn when it comes to paying authors and suppliers," they told PW. "The reason we stayed was to keep the company together and ensure everyone was paid but as soon as it was made clear to us that this was not happening, we handed in our notice."

Papers filed with the bankruptcy administrators states that management is seeking £840,000 is being sought in new investor commitments for Boundless. Ronjon Nag, a Silicon Valley investor and Stanford University professor has joined the board and Sharma will continue in her role, without taking a salary.

Asked about how she intends to rebuild trust with the industry, Sharma reaffirmed that the best way to do that is to "stay in business." The company will now rely on a more typical publishing model of acquiring books with advances and traditional contracts, but she admitted that some authors may want their rights back.

Boundless is also maintaining its publishing pipeline for 2025 and 2026. It currently has 18 titles on its spring/summer list, including Bloody Hell: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, an anthology edited by Mona Eltahawy; Goldengrove, a novel by twice Booker Prize–shortlisted Irish writer Patrick McCabe; and The Researcher’s First Murder, a “novel mystery” inspired by Cain’s Jawbone, by BBC comedian John Finnemore, the man who first solved Cain’s Jawbone in 2021. The company also continues to publish its Substack, Boundless Magazine, edited by Patrick Galbraith. Boundless will continue to be distributed in the U.S. by Consortium.

But the fundamental challenge remains: Boundless must become profitable while carrying forward Unbound's operational obligations. "We have a huge overhang still from old company in new company, and that has to be financed somehow," Sharma explained. Even paying for shipping for books prepaid by customers is beyond the company's means at the moment.

She warned that failure would mean "no further payments at all—historic or current—will be possible" as all cash would go to liquidators. "There's just two options available to us: we can end up becoming cash flow positive, or you shut down," she said. "And if you shut down, nobody gets paid at all."

Lessons for the industry

The Unbound collapse raises questions about alternative publishing models and the protection of author and customer funds. Cook of Cursor Literary noted the competitive nature of the industry: "Consortium has many other wonderful publishers booksellers can order books from and support," she said, citing such presses as Coach House Books, Transit, Charco, and Haymarket.

For Sharma, the experience underscores the complexity of corporate restructuring. "There is a misconception of this being an easy thing to do. It’s not. Administration is not an easy path and not somehow evading all responsibilities. It's hard, there are obligations and expenses involved." she said. "If we had not done this necessary process, we wouldn't be sitting here now. It would have been liquidation."

Whether Boundless will rebuild trust while servicing Unbound's debts remains an open question. As Sharma put it, "I cannot emphasize enough that we can pay you the goodwill payments covering Unbound's historic liabilities only if Boundless Publishing Group survives and thrives."

For now, hundreds of authors, thousands of customers, and industry partners can only wait to see if this chapter in the publisher's ongoing story will have a happy ending.

This article has been updated with new information for clarification.