Sold to newco Boundless Publishing Group on 10 March for a £50,000, with half split over a 10-month payment plan, United Authors Publishing Limited, which traded as Unbound, is expected to realise approximately £200,000 once book debts are recovered.
With an anticipated administration bill of £134,000, however, the defunct Unbound is unlikely to return much money to creditors. In the report, administrators Allister Manson and Charles Turner of Opus Restructuring said there may be a small dividend, estimated at 18p in the pound, due to the sole known secondary preferential creditor, HMRC.
Unsecured creditors are not anticipated to receive any dividend. The firm’s production suppliers may have escaped more lightly than others, thanks to Unbound’s policy of prioritising payments to printers to keep the business running: its eight production creditors accounted for just £75,000 of the £2.4m total.
However, 238 authors and agents were collectively owed £657,000 by the failed business and are also unlikely to receive a dividend, along with the nearly 8,000 website customers owed £391,000.
Due to the extraordinary number of individual creditors, administrators had to arrange them in groups; the largest single claim by group was for the firm’s ‘other trade and expense creditors’, owed £829,000.
Administrators said directors attributed Unbound’s ultimate fall into administration to “historical poor management of printing costs and associated cash flows, ultimately leading to the company’s inability to sustain profitable operations.”
Furthermore, Unbound had operated at a loss since its foundation in 2012, relying on investors to sustain operations. While it eventually reached profitability in 2023, it failed to secure the further capital necessary to stabilise its position, and ongoing trading losses and cash flow demands forced it to failure.
The estimated total deficiency to shareholders was a whopping £30.4m.
Unbound’s 18 staff transferred over to Boundless under the pre-pack sale. The new company, headed up by former Unbound CEO Archna Sharma – who was brought in on deferred compensation in January 2025 to help turn the publisher around – and majority owned by John Mitchinson, a former director at Unbound, is in a significantly better position to make a success of the business, according to a 6 March letter from Sharma to Unbound’s valuer Emily Muir of SIA Group Asset Ingenuity (SIA) which was published with the administrators’ report.
“Boundless IP Ltd. [as Boundless Publishing Group was called at the time] is a company with excellent intellectual property, a superb team and with revenues of close to £2m,” Sharma wrote.
Adding that investors had committed £840,000 to the new firm in cash and guarantees, and that one US-based investor was committed to securing additional funding once the company had stabilised, Sharma said the team had started a “systematic cost-reduction strategy across all areas of the business.”
Prior to entering administration, the company cut headcount by five employees, including the CEO, and reduced the founder’s salary by 50%, and cut employee hours.
“Everyone in the company knows we will be managing judiciously for cash, regardless of the size of our fund raise,” she added.
“We will post daily cash balances to our general Slack channel to heighten sensitivity to operational efficiencies.
“With these financial commitments and our ongoing restructuring efforts, we believe the company is well-positioned to emerge stronger and more efficient.”
Boundless' website is now functional, with visitors able to place orders for many of the books previously published through Unbound.
