Since I posted my thoughts on the collapse of Unbound, author, journalist and drinks historian Henry Jeffreys has written about his experiences as an Unbound author in The Critic.

His article, Balancing the books, provides some evidence of things I speculated about in my post, in particular the way Unbound co-founder John Mitchinson seems to be absolving himself of all involvement in the company’s failure.

I was laughing hollowly the other day as I read a column by Mitchinson on the back cover of the April issue of The Byline Times that my husband had left on the dining table. In it Mitchinson muses on how he has been thinking about the devil in recent days. My hollow laugh involved the thought, ‘I bet you were,’ and reignited anger at Mitchinson’s statement on his resignation from Boundless at the end of May, in which he outlines why he and seven senior staff members resigned and suggests, “None of us have other jobs to go to.” Perhaps that’s true of the seven senior staff members, but I’d be surprised if Mitchinson isn’t being paid by The Byline Times for the two columns he writes, or either of the companies he’s currently a director of, such as podcasting company Backlisted Limited and publishing services company Fugol Limited. Unless all of these are hobby jobs, of course.

The Byline Times needs to update Mitchinson’s bio as well. It’s impossible to be touting yourself as “co-founder of Unbound, the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for books” at this stage in the game. I’d suggest replacing “leading” with “failed”.

After reading Jeffreys’ article, I found this by comic book artist Aaron Reynolds, which is also worth a read. Reynolds seems to be giving Mitchinson the benefit of the doubt over his apology statement. I imagine that, when you’ve trusted in something for so long it’s hard to let go of the loyalty you feel, even to someone involved in shafting you.

Jeffreys ends his article by saying “There’s clearly more to come out.” I really hope United Authors Publishing/Unbound and Boundless are thoroughly investigated over the way they seem to have defrauded authors out of rotalties.