Statement on Unbound
June 6th, 2025
Unbound, my former UK publisher, owe me a lot of money.
What’s worse, though, is that during their collapse, it came to light that they were underreporting my sales and shorting my royalty payments.
So, I haven’t been paid for the last 18 months of book sales, and when they were paying me, they were underpaying by a lot. It was gutting to hear that my second book had flopped in the US, selling under 1000 copies. Two years later I found out that it actually sold over 10,000 copies and the reason that it was selling no new copies week to week was because there were no copies left to sell.
John Mitchison, Unbound’s publisher, posted a heartfelt apology yesterday, announcing that he was stepping away from the business because authors are not getting their money. I feel a lot of empathy for John, because he, too, lost his dream to Unbound’s financial mismanagement. But the act of destroying a creative person’s confidence to hide the company’s monetary losses is unforgivable.
It took me two years to get over the feeling of rejection that came from a book that, it turned out, was successful and should have had a second printing.
That fucking sucks.
p.s. go ahead and buy my books at your local bookstore. It’s impossible to know which copies I got paid properly for and which ones I didn’t, so don’t penalize your local shop. And if you’re feeling extra generous, come see me at an in-person event or grab something fun from my Threadless store.
