Indie Pub House Unbound/Boundless Owes Tens of Thousands to Authors

On Friday, May 30th, 2025, Indie Author Alex de Campi came to BlueSky to kvetch and the tea…was…scalding. de Campi had published a wildly popular queer medieval novel called The Scottish Boy with a crowdfunding publisher called Unbound back in 2019. Though they had originally had a good experience with Unbound and the terms were satisfactory, problems began to crop up. According to de Campi, October 2024 was when things were evidently falling apart, as writers began to notice that none of their royalty payments were coming in on schedule…or at all. As explained, Unbound went into receivership and was taken over by Boundless who were supposed to “make [things] right” by paying all of the back royalties over the course of a protracted time period so as not to create undue stress on the company.

Guess what didn’t happen.

Though they were able to pay a small amount of what was owed, the remainder simply did not materialize and CEO Archna Sharma took it upon herself to send out an email to explain that Boundless was simply not legally responsible for the past payments. This, ostensibly, should be false. Take this with a grain of salt here since I’m not a lawyer, but as I understand business, Boundless took over Unbound’s contracts which means they took over the terms of Unbound’s contracts as they were written. Should Boundless wish to retain the rights to any of the books created by these authors, they would have to make certain that none of these contracts have had their termination clauses triggered. Unfortunately for them, they already have. None of these contracts which contained any nonpayment termination clauses are already voided, and all it’s going to take for authors to begin extracting themselves from the clutches of a sinister indie publisher is a bunch of cease and desists.

It is important to note, of course, that Unbound’s business model did not require them to create or have capital of its own. It’s not like Penguin Random House where you might get a cash advance when your book is sold to them and they manage your book in ways that are standard to the industry. Unbound was a little more haphazard than this, placing all their chips into a crowd-funding model, where hype for a book created by the authors themselves and Unbound’s social media presence would be funded before printing even began. Much of this marketing work was done by the authors themselves, contributing to a bunch of work that a traditional publisher would not place upon the author aside from things like signings, appearances, etc. These are funds that were explicitly raised from the hype of those specific books, and as such, those proceeds were raised by those authors. Any wage theft is theft, of course, but this is on another level—those authors directly made that money.

Several other creators came out as victims of the Unbound/Boundless royalty fuck up after de Campi, including the popular Effin’ Birds artist who is purported to be owed over 75,000 British pounds. Understandably, it might seem like a lot to ask for a company acquiring another to immediately pay back every single one of the debts of the original company, but…well, that is what is expected if they want to keep the materials they claim to have rights to. Nevertheless, it’s become increasingly clear through the rumor mill that Boundless is seeking to move forward with cost-cutting moves such not paying back their debts, and the usage of language learning models (that is to say “AI”), raising ethical and copyright concerns in terms of what materials are now going to be produced by the indie publisher. While their whiny, self-serving 3AM email sought to boo-hoo their way into sympathy (oh no, administrators are working for free? very sad, anyway…), neither the authors they owe money to nor the unwitting supporters who bought the books were having any of it, prompting de Campi to formulate a plan—get together as many authors as possible and create a united front. Meanwhile, the readers only have to do one thing: don’t buy.

So while all of that is going on, the only thing we have to do is make sure Boundless knows just how disappointed we all are with them. Talk shit about them all you want, they don’t have the money to SLAPP you (and do it loudly if you’re an American), and do not buy any books from them. See if the authors have audiobooks through different services, as they might actually see the royalties for those as is the case for de Campi’s works. Just…don’t spend your money on these schmucks.