HURRAY! I Now Own My Books Again!
Why I took the rights back to my most recent seven books, and how you can get hold of them, without giving money to my (now ex) publishers
It’s official: I do! And, while it’s only the first stage in recovering from what’s happened to me over the last few months, it is an enormous relief….
Between 2017 and last year, I wrote seven books for the publisher Unbound, crowdfunding their production via my readers. Unbound set a total for each of these books, the agreement being that they would keep the first 100 percent of the funding, and whatever profits the books made after that would be shared equally between me and the company. All of these books, although not setting the world alight commercially, were well reviewed and sold well, to a loyal and gradually growing group of readers.
Then, last summer, something happened that I’d never anticipated: Unbound stopped paying me and their other authors the money they owed us. I waited, and waited - all the time desperately worried about the fate of my latest novel, Everything Will Swallow You, which was originally supposed to be published this month, and which I’d put more into than any book before it - but, as the months passed, the many thousands of pounds I was owed (and am still owed) did not arrive and the promises about when it would did not come true.
Finally, in mid-January, I made a big, scary decision: I chose to take the rights back to all seven books, including my new novel. Late last Friday, after many anxious weeks, feeling, at times, like my life’s work had been stolen in the night from beneath my pillow, I received word, via my agent, that I had officially got the rights back to my new novel and the six books prior to it.
I can now start to rebuild, with a clear head.
I want to thank everyone who has been supporting me on Substack through this tough time, whether that be via subscriptions, sharing links to my writing (this helps massively, even if it’s just with one or two friends) or leaving a kind or encouraging comment. It - along with the amazing recent support of my agent - has been the thing most responsible for keeping me positive, and it gives me hope that I can, in the not too distant future, turn a bad situation into a good one.
If you pledged for a hardback of Everything Will Swallow You, you are now due a refund from Unbound. An email should have arrived in your inbox from Unbound about this by now but, as I understand the situation via conversations I’ve had with some of you, at the time of writing that email still has not arrived. While I was wondering, yesterday, why Unbound hadn’t sent the email, I spotted an article in the Bookseller reporting that Unbound had gone into administration, and the people in charge would be forming a new company known as Boundless. It looks, from what can currently be seen on the homepage of the old Unbound website, like pledgers will be able to log in and ask for their refund at the end of this month….
I REALLY hope this is the case, because, being in breach of contract and having reverted rights to me, Unbound are obliged refund the pledge money of everyone who supported Everything Will Swallow You. Although, going on the fact that they have still not paid me what they owe me, I have concerns about their ability to do this. I hope they will prove me wrong about these concerns. Whatever the case, if you have pledged, please do contact their new incarnation when you can and make absolutely sure they are aware that you require your money back.
I will have more news soon about when Everything Will Swallow you will be published, and via which publisher, with a link to re-order - or pre-order for the first time (hopefully signed copies will also be available). I’ll also have some information about when the six books which came before it will be republished. In the meantime, there will be a brief period when those books are not available in shops… which is going to be frustrating, for me, and for some of you. HOWEVER, there is another bit of good news in all of this…
The remaining copies of those books which were in Unbound’s warehouse are, as of today, inside my house.
It was quite a job today to get them in off the drive after the friendly lady lorry driver dropped them off, but fortunately I had a big strong helper by my side…
I can’t currently get to the fridge quite as easily as I’d like, but I’m sure I’ll find a good place for them all, somehow, soon enough. In the meantime I’m hoping to get as many of them to the post office as possible.
I purchased these books from Unbound, as an advance on the money they owe me, with the thought that by selling them I would help tide myself over until I’m securely in the hands of a new publisher (that’s looking hopeful, by the way, though I can’t say too much just yet).
What I have are, specifically: 21st-Century Yokel, Help The Witch, Ring The Hill and Notebook and Villager (all paperbacks) and hardbacks of my most recent novel 1983.
Please note: some of these are quite expensive to send overseas. But Notebook, Ring The Hill - and possibly Help The Witch - will all go through the large letter mail slot, so are, for example, only £14.50 to send from the UK to the US, rather than the usual £20something.
I would of course ideally love to receive the cover price for each book, but, if you can’t afford that, I’m happy for you to pay the postage plus the price you can afford. If you WOULD like to order any of these, please drop me a message via the contact form on my website and let me know your address, and I’ll calculate postage and give you details of how to pay.
All copies will be signed (although unfortunately I won’t be able to do personal messages in each, because of time constraints).
I also have a few handmade bookmarks by my mum to send out with the first few orders.
ADDITIONALLY: For the next fortnight (at least) I will be sending a free signed copy of Ring The Hill to every new full annual paid subscriber to this page, wherever you are in the world.
For those of you who are new here, you can read a little about 1983 in this piece and I’ve included a brief guide to the other books below:
21st-Century Yokel, which was published in 2017, is what I normally suggest as a beginning point for people new to my work. It’s the first book I crowdfunded, probably the closest I get to a memoir and has lots of my LOUD DAD in it. It was born out of my frustration with what the traditional publishers I’d worked with before didn’t seem to want me to write about - which I felt I really needed to write about - and with the more worthy and humourless nature writing I’d read. I wanted to write a funny book about nature. But, in the end, I don’t think 21st-Century Yokel is centrally a nature book. It’s just as much social history, family, folklore, walking… life.
Ring The Hill is slightly less riotous than 21st-Century Yokel but is, I think, my best non-fiction book. It works as a companion piece, but concentrates a little more on landscape and the nomadic nature of my recent life. A self-styled “book marketing expert” on the internet told me that I made a mistake by giving it the name I did (Ring The Hill is an old English term for hare) and not getting a dog and calling it Going On Walks Up Hills With My Dog. She also said that Clare Melinsky’s cover design makes it look “like a chick lit romance”. I believe neither of these things are true. I think it is not a book aimed at people who buy books called things like Going On Walks Up Hills With My Dog. I also think Clare Melinsky is a shit hot artist who totally gets it.
Notebook - which is a collection of around a decade of excerpts from my notebooks, fashioned into an abstract narrative of sorts and inspired by the fever dream non-fiction storytelling of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights - is a good place to start with my work, especially if you want a short book that’s easy to dip into. It’s extremely silly, but also quite serious in places. You’ll probably enjoy it if you enjoy this piece.
Help The Witch was my first published attempt at short fiction. It’s not a summer book at all, and much of it was written in minus degree temperatures while snowed in at a house at the top of an enormous hill in northern England. I had fun experimenting with quite a few new kinds of storytelling in it. It won a Shirley Jackson horror writing award but it’s not a horror book; it’s just very eerie. It’s undoubtedly marinated in the spookiest parts of the English landscape but it arguably owes more to Grace Paley and Annie Proulx than it does to MR James.
Villager was my first novel: my attempt to come up with a psychedelic narrative that had the feel of some of my favourite records from the late 60s. It’s set in and around a fictional moorland village called Underhill, has many many narrators, dots around in time over the course of almost two centuries, and is full of haunted water. You might like it if you like ghosts, rivers, folklore, social and oral history, lost music, teenage warrior queens or opinionated hills. It is, alongside 1983 and Everything Will Swallow You, the book I’m most proud of.
The last few months have not been the most fun, and there’s work to be done yet, but I think, just maybe, it’s all going to be ok.
Tom
(13th March, 2025)
Congratulations...now we just need a re-release..."Tom's Version"
Congratulations! How is it living in a book warehouse?