Parent company | United Authors Publishing Ltd. |
---|---|
Status | Active |
Founded | 9 June 2010 |
Founder | Justin Pollard, John Mitchinson, Dan Kieran |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | London, N1 |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
Unbound, the online trading name of United Authors Publishing Ltd, is a privately held international crowdfunded publishing company. [1] [2] It is based in London, UK. The company was founded by John Mitchinson, director of research for the British television panel game QI ; Justin Pollard, historian and QI researcher; and author Dan Kieran. [3] [4]
In 2016 [5] Unbound launched a podcast called Backlisted, involving a guest (typically a writer) share a book they love and why it deserves more coverage. Some bookshops now carry a Backlisted section due to the popularity of the podcast.
In the fall of 2017 Unbound launched Boundless, an online literary magazine with a focus on long form writing and tackling the decline in traditional media. Arifa Akbar, former literary editor of The Independent , was brought in as the editor. [6]
In March 2021, the company announced a crowdfunder for 42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams, a book based on Douglas Adams' papers, edited by Kevin Jon Davies. [7] The book was published on 28 August 2023 ( ISBN 9781800182684) and became a Sunday Times number one bestseller. [8]
The following authors were on the original launch list:
Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG). Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books which sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Terence Graham Parry Jones was a Welsh actor, comedian, director, popular historian, writer and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe.
Katherine Louise Mosse is a British novelist, non-fiction and short story writer and broadcaster. She is best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, which has been translated into more than 37 languages. She co-founded in 1996 the annual award for best UK-published English-language novel by a woman that is now known as the Women's Prize for Fiction.
The British Book Awards or Nibbies are literary awards for the best UK writers and their works, administered by The Bookseller. The awards have had several previous names, owners and sponsors since being launched in 1990, including the National Book Awards from 2010 to 2014.
Anna Funder is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and the novella The Girl With the Dogs.
Kevin Jon Davies is a British television and video director primarily associated with documentaries and spin-off videos associated with Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Blake's 7. He also worked on the BAFTA award-winning animation sequences of the 1981 Hitchhiker's Guide television adaptation.
John Mitchinson is the head of research for the British television panel game QI, and is also the managing director of Quite Interesting Limited. He is co-writer of the QI series of books with the show's creator John Lloyd. The two men are normally referred to as "The Two Johns" and are seen as the main controllers of QI, as they do most of the research of the show. His most recent work, 1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways, a collaboration with John Lloyd and James Harkin, was released in 2015 with W.W. Norton and Company.
YouWriteOn was launched in January 2006 as an online writing circle to help new writers gain critical feedback on their work and improve their chances of getting published. Each month, YouWriteOn's top ten rated opening chapters receive feedback from professional editors working for major publishing houses.
Wakefield Press is an independent publishing company based in the Adelaide suburb of Mile End, South Australia. They publish around 40 titles a year in many genres and on many topics, with a special focus on South Australian stories.
Myriad Editions is an independent UK publishing house based in Brighton and Hove, Sussex, specialising in topical atlases, graphic non-fiction and original fiction, whose output also encompasses graphic novels that span a variety of genres, including memoir and life writing, as well political non-fiction. The company was set up in 1993 by Anne Benewick, together with Judith Mackay, as a packager of infographic atlases.
The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. Philip Jones is editor-in-chief of the weekly print edition of the magazine and the website. The magazine is home to the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, a humorous award given annually to the book with the oddest title. The award is organised by The Bookseller's diarist, Horace Bent, and had been administered in recent years by the former deputy editor, Joel Rickett, and former charts editor, Philip Stone. We Love This Book is its quarterly sister consumer website and email newsletter.
C. M. Taylor is the pen name of Craig Taylor, an English novelist, screenwriter and lecturer.
Atlantic Books is an independent British publishing house, with its headquarters in Ormond House in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden. It is perhaps best known for publishing Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger, which received the 40th Man Booker Prize in 2008, and for its long-standing relationship with the late Christopher Hitchens.
Tom Cox is a Nottinghamshire-born British author who, as of 2021, has published twelve books. Recurring themes in his writing include folklore, rambling, wildlife, psychedelic rock, cat ownership, local history, and golf.
Parthian Books is an independent publisher based in Cardigan, Wales. Editorially-led, it publishes a range of contemporary fiction, poetry, drama, art books, literature in translation, and non-fiction. Since its foundation in 1993, Parthian has published some of the best-known works of contemporary Welsh literature including Work, Sex and Rugby (1993) by Lewis Davies, In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (2000) by Rachel Trezise, Crawling Through Thorns (2008) by John Sam Jones, Pigeon (2017) by Alys Conran, and Hello Friend We Missed You (2020) by Richard Owain Roberts.
Steve "S. J." Watson is an English writer. He debuted in 2011 with the thriller novel Before I Go to Sleep. Rights to publish the book have been sold in 42 countries and it has continued to be an international bestseller.
Rachel Abbott is an English author of psychological thrillers. A self-publisher, her first seven novels have combined to sell over three million copies, and have all been bestsellers on Amazon's Kindle store. In 2015, she was named the 14th bestselling author over the last five years on Amazon's Kindle in the UK.
Orna Ross is the pen name of Aine McCarthy, born 1960. She is an Irish author, former literary agent, blogger and an advocate for creativism. She is the founder of the Alliance for Independent Authors, a professional association for authors who self-publish their work, and has been named one of the top 100 most influential people in publishing by The Bookseller, the UK publishing trade magazine.
E O Higgins is a British fiction writer, podcaster, and performer.
Yomi Adegoke is a British journalist and author.