I received an email from them saying Louisa had delivered the manuscript in February, then again the exact same email in May, the one before that had said Louisa had passed the project to them to compile so WTFK
I can't decide whether to email them for refund, hah! Or wait and see. The book if it materialises could be gold.
It was intended to be an anthology of collected essays on poverty. Louisa was to be the editor who would source writers, commission their work and then tie the whole thing together in some sort of coherent shape. Which she was patently unqualified to do (I know this because I had some tangential involvement at this early stage of the project
). She didn't have the first clue and also her belligerent personality made the whole thing impossible -- she would not take direction, was over-confident of her own abilities and is not someone who made any "lived experience" authors feel they were in safe hands.
Unbound were *supposed* to offer her more support in terms of getting the thing moving. But it was always flawed because the types of first-person essays they wanted are very difficult for people who might not be trained writers or might also find it hard to mine their own trauma for the page (without any clear objective as this was missing from the original brief), for a
crappy fee, no guarantee of your work actually being published etc. They should have worked with one of the many organisations who bring together people living in poverty in various communities across the land but they did not do this.
In the meantime, there was another excellent book on poverty that came out last year (I think) which was co-edited by Frances Ryan of the Guardian. A more high-brow anthology, with [pieces by analysts and sector experts, rather than "lived experience" people. But still a good contribution to the field.
Now there's no point. With a new govt incoming, there's no reason to publish something that looks back on the last decade -- everything will be about looking forward to the new govt's policy agenda and how to influence this. Any new critical writing on poverty will have to engage with austerity, of course, but will also be about what to do now -- the Fabians, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and any number of campaigning/policy bodies are on the case already.
Unbound screwed up. They accepted a project Louisa sold to them and they kept it going, kept asking for crowdfunded contributions long after they should have realised Louisa was never going to complete it to a standard ready for commercial publication. And they should have spiked it over a year ago and refunded everyone's money. Any contributions they did receive should revert back to the authors' ownership, they should do the decent thing and pay the £250 to everyone who coughed up an essay, and they should suck up whatever money they advanced to RSM (It would not have been a lot and her payments would have been staggered according to deliverables).
ETA: whatever manuscript they say they received in February? Puhleeze. Either you rework the thing and beat it into shape and it should be hitting the printers already or you kill it dead because it's a non-starter. Unbound must just 'fess up and move on, FGS.
And it seems to me you lived your life
