Normal service will be resuming shortly

You might have noticed that there’s been a bit of a gap between posts recently. Some of you may also have spotted that Unbound - as in the publishers who were going to be putting out Burning Down The House - have been in difficulties. (For those of you who haven’t, an outline of the situation has been in both the Guardian and the Bookseller.)

These two things are connected. As you might imagine, it’s quite hard to carry on with a book when you’ve got no idea whether the publisher is solvent or not, so I stopped for a while and did other things¹ while I waited to see what would happen. Now there is good news. Unbound has reformed itself into Boundless and will be publishing Burning Down The House next year.

This is particularly good news for any of you who have pledged for it, as you will be getting a copy of the book when it comes out. Hurrah, and thank goodness.

I am aware that not everyone involved with Unbound has been so lucky, and that there are some authors whose projects have been cancelled, and many more readers who have pledged for books which are not going to appear, and who may not be getting their money back. But I have to balance that against the fact that I will be continuing to work with a pair of really excellent editors who really believe in the book, and that I do have faith that the new company, no longer led by someone from a dot com business, is not going to be as daft with money as the last one². I hope.

So, here we go. And as I am now up against quite a tight schedule (and cursing myself for not carrying on), there are likely to be quite a few more posts over the next three months, as I work out what I think about servants, architectural detailing and the curatorial oddities of the National Trust. Watch this space.

1. Most of the bills round here do not get paid by writing. Instead, I spend my time working with developer, councils and architects trying between us to create places that work better for women and girls. I may write about this at some point if anyone is interested, and it’s definitely going to be the next book…

2. The last two rounds of investment funding raised money for an online digital magazine (why, just why, and “a machine-learning tool developed by the publisher which was designed to assess someone’s X (formerly Twitter) network, and estimate how effectively they could crowdfund a book”. A significant chunk of over a million pounds went to that, and no, it never worked.