| I met Tom Cox here in the shop a couple of years ago when he popped in to say hello and sign some stock for us. He’s Devon based now, but has previously lived in Bristol and retains an affection for the place, so pops back regularly. His great preoccupations as a writer are the British landscape and the folklore associated with it, these themes evolving across his writing over the years.
Tom has been published by Unbound for the last six years or so, writing roughly a book a year in that time. Unbound were a publisher with an unusual business model – they published books when they reached a crowd-sourcing threshold, meaning that the costs of production were covered by customers before the books were published.
At some point in the last few years Unbound began to experience financial problems, and their authors stopped receiving royalty payments. Earlier this year the company declared bankruptcy, with their authors, and freelance staff, still owed money (in Tom’s case, thousands of pounds in royalty payments). The executives immediately set up another publisher, Boundless, and will trade as a traditional model press despite the debts their previous publisher left unpaid. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what I think about such practices.
Tom managed to retrieve the publication rights to his books from Unbound, and though he still has not received the unpaid royalties owed, he did manage to secure the unsold stock of his titles, which are now occupying the majority of his house. Last week he got in touch to ask whether we would be happy to take a selection of his books directly from him to be sold in the shop. We have happily done so, and will be offering them at a discount while our stocks last. We are pleased to be able to help Tom get back some of the funds he should have received from his work, and possibly even happier to be able to help him reach his fridge again without having to precariously negotiate teetering ziggurats of paperbacks.
Below is the selection of stock we have available at reduced prices, available from our website via the links. |
