Recently there’s been quite a bit of drama in the book publishing world. Sometime in the past couple of years, UK-based publisher Unbound stopped paying royalties to its authors, and as of late 2024, went bankrupt. All of the rights to its titles were transferred to a new company, Boundless, who pledged to pay owed back royalties to its authors, and even set up payment schedules. However, as of an email sent on May 29, 2025 by the new CEO, they were unable to pay these owed royalties to anyone, and started referring to these as “goodwill payments”. There’s some legalese to this words, but the general understanding among authors is that they probably wouldn’t be seeing any of their owned money anytime soon, if ever. Some of the industry news can be found quoted in this Reddit post.
For some background – most HG101 books are self-published through Amazon’s KDP print-on-demand service. However, a few of my books are through different publishers – A Guide to Japanese RPGs comes from Bitmap Books, while the new Now Playing: The Guide to 1980s and 90s Movie Games is from Press Run Books. The Japanese Video Game Obscurities book was published by Unbound, which means that this book was affected by this whole debacle.
Unbound was a bit unusual in that it was a crowdfunding-based publisher. They’d put up for your book for a crowdfunding campaign, and if it was successful, it would get published. Unbound had approached me in early 2017 about doing some kind of book, and I said “okay”. It seems like there was a push to publish some video game books, with a handful of other games making it to market around mine, like Larry Bundy’s Fact Hunt and Did You Know Gaming’s Region Locked. (A mostly full list can be found at The Video Game Library.) They gave me full editorial control over the project, which was nice. We tried to think of a better title, looking at Stuart Ashen’s Attack of the Flickering Skeletons for inspiration, but couldn’t come up with anything better than Japanese Video Game Obscurities. This is not great, but awkward titles are something of an HG101 trademark at this point.
They first set up the campaign on their own website, which didn’t draw much support, but they moved it over to Kickstarter, where the book was funded successfully, raking in nearly £30,000 altogether. My first hint that something was amiss was when I got an email from the Unbound producer who’d contracted my book, and said he was being let go for not reaching his sales targets. D’oh!
The design and editing process went smoothly, with one problem that I didn’t realize until the book hit the market – there was an error on one of the pages where an incorrect box art image was used. While they had sent me PDFs to review during the editing process, they never sent a final print PDF to approve. What likely happened is a quirk in InDesign – while all of the images were divided into folders, some of them may have had identical filenames, and the designer who output the final output package didn’t double check to make sure they were correct in the final layout. While mistakes are an unavoidable part of book production, it always kills me when things like this make into print, and this would’ve been something I would’ve definitely picked up on had this basic process been followed and had a chance to review everything.
Anyway, it took a few years for the book to make it to market, finally releasing in late 2019 and hitting US Amazon in early 2020 (right in time for the pandemic!), which was longer than I’d anticipated but fairly standard for book publishing, as is my understanding. Outside of the glaring box art misprint, I think the book came out pretty well and it seems to have been well received by readers too, based on feedback as well as (most) Amazon reviews.
But the first big shock was when I got my first royalty statement in mid-2020, where I found that not only would I not be getting any money, but the whole project was approximately £2,000 in the hole. Let me explain!
When it comes to book publishing, there are a few types of royalty payment structures. One of them will simply give you a percentage of the cover price – for example, 10% of $40 would get you $4 per sale. Another popular one is more complicated, which takes into account book production costs, and then gives the author 50% of the profits. For example, if a book costs $30,000 to produce, and it makes $40,000 in sales, then it made $10,000 in profit, and the author would get $5,000.
My contract with Unbound specified the latter royalty structure. Unfortunately, the amount of money from both the crowdfunding campaign and the first few months of sales were not enough to cover the costs and make any royalties. The first statement I received gave thorough breakdowns of how the costs were allocated, and while nothing seemed openly fraudulent, there were some line items that raised my eyebrows. For example, they had paid £9,500 for the design and layout, which seemed like awfully high based on the fairly straightforward template used in the book. I wanted to highlight this because this alone was far more money than I ever received in royalties. There was also a “photo reproduction” costs of £1,800, which could apply to either scanning photos for use in the book or to pay for the rights to use certain images. But I’d provided all of the images and it wasn’t clear who they would’ve been paying for any types of rights, since almost everything in here was from old Japanese video games, so who knows where that money went, if anywhere.
Also, while this was a rookie mistake, I didn’t get an advance at all. An advance is not free money, as it’s applied against future royalties – for example, if you get an advance for $5,000, and once the book goes on sale, you make $6,000 on royalties, you’re only paid $1,000 because that $5,000 was paid in advance. That means that despite starting work on the book in 2017, I didn’t see a cent for roughly five years. This is my own fault for not negotiating things, and it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run anyway, but it’s a good practice to always at least ask for something up front so you’re not just paid in air for a long time.
But what played a big role – which is less of an accounting thing, and more of a business error on their part – was that they simply printed too many copies. Some indie crowdfunding campaigns seek just the cost of printing the books for supporters with a handful of leftovers, but Unbound actually did them for a full print run to get it onto market. Overall, they printed approximately 3,500 copies, which I think was ultimately too high, as that bit severely into the profits. (About 625 went to campaign backers.) But it was also something I had no say over.
However, I think this is connected to another issue – the main reason I wanted to get traditionally published was the potential to make it into bookstores. The whole book was conceived and written from a “casual hardcore” standpoint – for example, I think most HG101 readers know what a Sakura Wars is, but it’s not something than an average video game enthusiast would be familiar with. So the book was intended to help educate readers who were enthusiastic about the topic but didn’t know much about it, an audience you’d have a better chance of capturing if they were browsing at a bookstore, instead of surfing online.
In the end, I don’t think it made it in very many bookstores at all. Granted, I think it launching during the pandemic probably had some role in this, when bookstores weren’t even really open or trafficked for several months. Someone sent me a picture of it at the Kinokuniya bookstore in New York City (though I could never find it stocked there when I visited), and I later found a copy at Forbidden Planet, a comic book store also in NYC. That was it. The only other Unbound book I ever found was a different video game book (Fuck Yeah Video Games), at a Canada-based chain called Indigo. But I never saw mine or most other Unbound books anywhere else. Perhaps they just didn’t have great distribution in the USA. 3,500 copies made sense to me if they were trying to get it into bookstores, but since that didn’t seem to have happened, most of them are still in a warehouse somewhere.
Another point of contention was the digital copies, which were apparently awful. (Check the Amazon reviews!) For books like mine, digital copies are basically a collection of high res image files, but it seems like for the Japanese Video Games Obscurities book, either the images were too low resolution or too much compression was applied. I handle this process for the HG101 Kindle books, and I ensure it’s as crisp as possible, but apparently Unbound didn’t want to do this. Amazon KDP has a weird royalty structure – either they give you a flat 35% royalty, or they give you a 70% royalty but deduct some money based on the file size. If you have a lot of high res images, that eats into the profits. So either they cheaped out, or they didn’t know what they were doing. Anyway, according to my royalty statement, it cost over 500 pounds for digital book production, something I can do in less than ten minutes. I sent them a complaint of the bad image quality and eventually they responded that everything was done correctly on their end and there was nothing to be done.
Anyway, it still made some sales via Amazon. Royalty statements were sent every six months, and after a couple of periods, it eventually crawled out of the red and I started making some royalties. It wasn’t much – roughly £500 per six months – but it was money I enjoyed having.
But another red flag came with its accounting. At some point down the line, the book ended up back in the hole again, due to a nebulous “marketing” charge. I questioned this with Unbound, especially since they didn’t seem to market it all. They replied that it was an outstanding payment that hit the records long after the fact. There wasn’t much I could do, so it was what it was. In the next royalty statement, it was back in the black.
It puttered along until in late 2023, when one day I checked my bank account and noticed that the money owed for the royalty statement hadn’t been paid. I hounded them regularly, and eventually they admitted their payment system was being overhauled. This made sense, because there used to be a portal I could access to get my royalty statements, and instead my most recent one had been uploaded to a dropbox. Months passed, I got another royalty statement…but still no payment at all. Further emails, including CCs to the CEO, went unanswered.
Then in late 2024, they finally responded that Unbound was out of money, they couldn’t pay anyone, and they were working to get things together to form a new company, with the help of both book sales and investor funds, to bring it back alive, which is where we are today. It doesn’t seem like they’ve been particularly successful with this.
I talked to a few other authors and apparently their experiences were even worse. One hadn’t seen any royalties ever; another apparently had once been paid too much by mistake and later had funds taken out of their account! But the general consensus among all of us was that Unbound had had an appetite for video game-themed books but had no idea how to market them, and therefore didn’t.
In the end, despite the many problems, I only have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, the Japanese Video Game Obscurities book was handily the easiest project I worked on. For most of my books, I’m in charge of the writing, editing, design, commissioning, almost everything. For this, I just had to focus on the playing, writing, and researching – you know, the fun stuff! – while they took care of everything else. In the end, their contribution came at a cost, but altogether it was much less stressful to produce than my other books.
Also, the fact that it didn’t seem much financial success also means that, in the end, I wasn’t screwed over that badly – between 18 months of royalties, I’m due about £1,500, which is money that my bank account would appreciate, but it won’t financially ruin me. I also have more than 20 other books in print plus I work a day job, which greatly helps cushion the blow. But across social media, I’ve seen authors that are owed much, much more money, all people that depended on this money to cover their living expenses, and these are the ones that deserve the most sympathy. I don’t know what the future holds, but hopefully we’ll all get paid what we’re owed, while Unbound exists as yet another cautionary tale in the book publishing industry.
Anyway, I had planned for a follow-up volume to Japanese Video Game Obscurities and even wrote a whole bunch of stuff, but when the book wasn’t exactly a sales success, it became clear that it probably wouldn’t happen. Most of these written pieces planned for the sequel have since either been published on the site in the Japanese Video Game Obscurities column or repurposed for other projects (I think a few of them ended up in the Guide to Japanese RPGs book). I have started an initiative to cover import-only PS1 games, which you may have noticed over the past year or so, and eventually compile them into a big book, which I think makes for a more focused topic. But it won’t be published by Unbound/Boundless, that’s for sure! You may have also noticed that I had originally used this column to help advertise the book but stopped putting in links when I stopped getting money for the sales. So even if you buy the Japanese Video Game Obscurities book now, the money is probably going into the pit that is Boundless, but it’s unclear if it’ll ever actually reach me.
I’m sure all of us authors will be reviewing our contracts to verify if the rights go back to us, so hopefully we’ll find more appropriate for our works in the future, even if it means self-(re)publishing.
As a final note, I was reviewing my files and found one of the original cover sketches. The Sega/Game Freak game Pulseman was originally planned for inclusion and the hero was featured on the cover, but for some reason (probably space constraints) I had to cut it, so Pulseman had to be removed from the final image. Sorry little buddy, I’ll make it up to you some day! He ended up getting replaced with Yuna from Galaxy Fraulein Yuna.
