My book, available on Amazon - How to Publish a Book - without getting ripped off If you think you need a literary agent to be a "proper" published author, you're not alone, and you're also not right. It's one of the biggest myths in the writing world, and it keeps a lot of brilliant authors stuck before they've even started. Let's unpick where this belief comes from, and why it simply doesn't hold up anymore. Where the Literary Agent Myth Comes From For most of the 20th century, a literary...

By Karen Stanley | Mabel and Stanley Publishing You've done the hard thing. You wrote the book. You published the book. And now... not much is happening. The sales are disappointing. The reviews are slow to arrive. You're starting to wonder whether your book just isn't good enough, and that thought, if you let it take hold, can be genuinely crushing. So I want to stop you right there. In my experience of working with 80+ authors, poor book sales are almost never about the quality of the...

So you've written a book. Or you're writing one. Or you've been thinking about writing one for longer than you'd like to admit. And you've decided — or you're considering self-publishing it... Good. Because honestly, for a lot of writers in 2026, it's the smartest decision you can make. But...and this is important...only if you go in knowing what you're doing. Because the self-publishing world is brilliant and accessible and full of opportunity...it also has more than its fair share of people...