Boundless Publishing Group and its imprint Neem Tree Press entered liquidation and stopped conducting business as of Friday, ending a months-long effort to rescue the assets of failed crowdfunding publisher Unbound and make restitution to and revive the fortunes of its authors and supporters.
The liquidations eliminates any remaining hope for the 238 authors and agents who are owed £657,000 by Unbound, nearly 8,000 customers owed £391,000 for pre-ordered books, and trade creditors owed £829,000 when the original company collapsed in March.
"It is with deep sadness that I share the news that both Boundless Publishing Group and Neem Tree Press are being placed into liquidation," CEO Archna Sharma said in an August 1 statement. "This is not the outcome I had hoped for. I poured my heart into rescuing Unbound through Boundless Publishing Group, and of course in building Neem Tree Press over a number of years, championing wonderful authors."
Sharma said she "fought as hard as I could—through a challenging acquisition, a restructuring process, and an unforgiving economic climate—but ultimately, the financial and operational pressures proved too great to overcome."
Brief respite
Boundless was formed in March when Unbound entered pre-packaged bankruptcy. Sharma and Unbound cofounder John Mitchinson acquired Unbound's assets for £50,000 through the new company, which took on no legal obligation for the predecessor's debts.
The Boundless founders initially pledged to make "goodwill payments" to cover Unbound's previous liabilities. However, by May, Sharma announced these payments would be suspended due to cash flow constraints.
"We simply do not have the cash at the moment to make further historic goodwill payments," Sharma wrote to authors at the time. "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."
Mitchinson resigned from Boundless shortly after the payment suspension, calling the company's position "morally and financially unacceptable."
In a June interview with PW, Sharma acknowledged inheriting significant problems from Unbound while attempting to restructure the business around a traditional publishing model rather than crowdfunding.
"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," Sharma said at the time. "The only way that we can fix it is if we can keep our business going and move ahead."
Sharma, a former investment banker who became Unbound's CEO in January after the company acquired her Neem Tree Press, said that due diligence had failed to reveal the extent of Unbound's financial problems.
"If I had known what I knew later, I would obviously have not done the deal," she said. "Was my due diligence faulty? Was I just misreading the tea leaves?"
The company sought £840,000 in new investment to fund operations and service debts, but was unable to secure sufficient funding. Multiple staff departures followed the suspension of historic payments, with employees citing concerns about leadership and broken promises to authors.
What’s next?
Authors published by both Unbound and Boundless will have their rights automatically reverted. Under Unbound's contracts, rights did not revert during the March administration because the bankruptcy was "immediately followed by a reconstruction or amalgamation" through the Boundless acquisition.
The fate of existing copies of Unbound and Boundless's titles is less clear, and it is an open question as to whether publishers who acquire rights will be able to adopt existing ISBNs, thus allowing the continuation of sales, or whether existing stock will need to be pulped. In some cases, authors may be able to acquire stock of their own titles. At present, books in the U.S. are warehoused at Ingram, the parent company of Unbound/Boundless's distributor Consortium.
In her statement announcing the company's closure, Sharma thanked supporters across the publishing ecosystem.
"To every author, reader, bookseller, all the wonderful people and companies in the publishing ecosystem, investors and team members who have supported and cheered me, and Neem Tree Press, on over the years: thank you," she said. "Your encouragement and kind words meant everything to me."
A liquidator has been engaged to assist with the voluntary liquidation process. Any remaining cash will go to the liquidator rather than to creditors or authors owed money from either company's operations.
Mixed legacy
Over the course if its 14-year-old history, Unbound published 750 books and had approximately £3 million in annual revenue with £250,000 in profit at its peak. The company's bestselling title was the mystery puzzle book Cain's Jawbone, which sold more than 500,000 copies after becoming a viral hit.
The collapse highlights ongoing challenges with alternative publishing models and author protections. Unbound's crowdfunding system allowed customer pre-order funds to be used for general operations rather than held in escrow for specific book fulfillment. But crowdfunded pre-sales did not necessarily translate to trade sales.
Despite some notable successes, Unbound's underlying business model proved unsustainable. Still, many doubts about "where the money went" remain, and some authors have gone so far as to accuse the former executives of the company of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, including providing misaligned sales and royalty figures.
In an interview with PW, John Mitchinson said the crowdfunding publisher's collapse resulted from a combination of business pressures and cash flow problems.
According to Mitchinson, the business faced mounting challenges beginning in late 2023, including excessive over-printing copies of 42: The Wildly Improbably Ides of Douglas Adams, website migration issues to Shopify, and significant drops in Twitter-driven crowdfunding pledges. "We go from 20% of our crowdfunding pledges coming via Twitter to less than 5% in the space of about six months," Mitchinson said, describing changes that occurred in late 2023 and early 2024.
The changes led to a significant financial shortfall, despite the company earning some £3 million pounds in revenue a year, which prevented them from paying timely royalties. Mitchinson then said operational challenges compounded existing business challenges and, furthermore, the company was unable to attract investment.
"There's always been that tension between the investors looking for a return from an entrepreneurial startup and publishing, which entails building an IP business on small margins and incremental growth," he said.
The company had raised venture capital throughout its 14-year history, with accumulated losses of approximately £9 million roughly equating to total investment received, according to Mitchinson. He acknowledged the commercial success of Cain's Jawbone, but said that printing costs and low margins on print-on-demand copies limited profitability.
Mitchinson strongly denied allegations of financial misrepresentation. He acknowledged that mistakes occurred, but disputed suggestions of fraud. "Publishers do make financial and accounting mistakes," he said. "The idea that that was somehow a kind of policy would be deeply shocking." He added that, "If people believe that to be the case, then they need to show evidence.”
Despite the business failure, Mitchinson highlighted several publishing successes from Unbound's catalog. He cited The Good Immigrant, a 2016 anthology edited by Nikesh Shukla that brought together 21 writers of color to exame race and immigration in the U.K. Other significant works included Alice Jolly's memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, which won the 2016 PEN Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography, and Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and notable for being written in a unique "shadow tongue" meant to evoke Anglo-Saxon English.
The publisher also worked with established authors like Patrick McCabe, the acclaimed Irish novelist known for the Booker Prize–shortlisted books The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, and extended to illustrated works by Jackie Morris, including The Unwinding and Other Dreamings, and folk horror collections such as Richard Wells' Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology.
