[This is the text of a message Adam Roberts and I are sending to all the people who subscribed to the Wonders and Visions project—a visual history of science fiction, traced through cover-art and illustration from the earliest days to the present—back when the publishers Unbound were a going concern. Both Adam and I are also posting the text to our blogs to clarify the situation.]
Dear all
We are emailing with regard to the Wonder and Visions book, which we have been writing over the last several years, and to which you pledged when the project was due to appear under the Unbound imprint. When Unbound went into administration this March, we were told that the book was being taken forward by its successor company Boundless, and we continued working on it. On Friday August 1st, Boundless ceased trading. The larger context is widespread reporting that Unbound had been failing to pay royalties to authors, and that there were underlying issues of financial mismanagement.
Clearly this is an awful set of circumstances—not least for unpaid Unbound authors and for readers who pledged to support books. We have now been told that the rights for Wonders and Visions have reverted to us, which means we are at liberty to find a new publisher for it. The research and writing for Wonders and Visions is mostly done—all other things being equal, we would have had a final draft by the end of 2025, and would have looked to see the book go into production in 2026.
For the record, neither of us has received any payment for the work we’ve done on this book. There was nothing inherently worrying about that: we were to be paid after publication on sales made. We have lost only the labour and time spent researching, writing and assembling the work. As subscribers you, we are aware, have lost the money you pledged.
We are emailing you all to apprise you of the situation, and to canvas opinion on what to do, to see what people would prefer in terms of going forward.
To be clear: we are writing in a purely personal capacity: there is no further support or input from Boundless, which has ceased to exist as a company. This message is just us.
Since the rights have reverted to us, we are legally able to approach another publisher with the project. We can do this, although realistically it is not likely a regular press will take up the book. The money raised via your pledges was to be used to fund three things: one, the salaries of the publishing professionals, the editors, legal, proofing, designers and compositors, who would have set the book up ready for publication (these people have all lost their jobs, and gained nothing, from the collapse of the company); two, the physical costs of actually producing the book—paper, full-colour printing, binding, shipping and delivery; and three, very importantly, a fund to cover the copyright permissions. Wonders and Visions was to include SF art from the early nineteenth-century right through to the present day. Some of the earlier material is out of copyright, but all the more recent stuff requires us to obtain permission from the rights holders—usually the specific artist—and to pay them a permissions fee. This is a legal as well as an ethical necessity and the budget set aside to cover it was quite large. To take the project to a new publisher would mean finding one not only willing to publish an expensive, glossy and full-colour book (few publishers do this, although there are some that specialise in it: Phaidon and Thames and Hudson for instance) but also persuading them to shoulder all these additional expenses—as well as the extra cost of providing you, the original Unbound subscribers, with copies of the finished product, since you cannot be expected to pay twice for your book. It is not impossible that this might happen, but it is, frankly, unlikely. For a press to swallow such large upfront costs would only be likely if they thought downstream sales would recoup them all and make a profit, which would only happen if the book were a significant seller. But a project like this, expensive and niche, is unlikely to crack the bestseller lists.
The two of us have discussed alternatives. We could compile the material we have into an ebook, since the illustrations have been selected and the text is pretty much finished. But there are three problems with this. One is that we can’t afford to pay professionals to produce the finished text (the editors, compositors, designers and so on mentioned above), so it would just be the two of us: laborious for us and liable to be more or less amateurish in terms of the finished product. Two is the permissions issue: we would not be offering this ebook for general sale—it would just be for the people who pledged to the original project—but even so legally we would be obliged to obtain and pay permissions for in-copyright work, and we simply don’t have the money. Three is perhaps the biggest problem: you pledged for a professionally produced physical book, and an ebook cobbled together by the two of us would be a very poor substitute for that.
It is possible that what you would like is, simply, your money back. Neither of us can personally reimburse you. We are as much victims of the collapse of Unbound/ Boundless as you—or if not quite as much (as we say, we have lost only our labour, rather than actual money), as authors, not publishers, we are not legally liable. And we are certainly not independently wealthy enough to refund you out of our pockets. If a refund is definitely what you want then we encourage you to email the liquidators at boundless@frpadvisory.com spelling out your situation and requesting reimbursement. We do not know how likely it is that you’ll get money. In the case of bankruptcy, creditors and claimants sometimes get a fraction of what they are owed, but there are many claims upon Unbound/Boundless not least from authors and freelancers who are owed royalties and fees, and it seems as if there is no money left in what used to be the company.
We’d also like to record here how deeply disappointed and frustrated the two of us have been by the whole Unbound/Boundless situation, a circumstance about which we knew nothing until the collapse occurred. We have worked long and hard at a project we both care about, and it is bitter to think it might all have been wasted. It is also worth noting that we both have full-time jobs, which are (for various reasons) particularly time-consuming and encompassing at the moment, and liable to continue being so, for us both, for another year and more; and that Adam has other publishing contracts and writing projects to which he is committed:—which is to say, we don’t have infinite time and personal resources to dedicate to whatever we decide is the best way forward for Wonders and Visions—although we both feel bad that you have all been baulked of your book, a book into which we have put so much time and effort.
With best wishes,
Adam Roberts
Graham Sleight
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