Fed up that your latest masterpiece has failed to make it out of the literary agents' "slush piles" of unread manuscripts?
Self-publishing - paying a printer to run off a few hundred copies - has long been available as a last resort to frustrated amateur authors.
But it does not come cheap, and the chances of having a hit are virtually non-existent - it's with good reason that the practice is known as "vanity publishing".
Help appears to be at hand in the form of websites on which writers can publish their novels and sell them as e-books for electronic readers such as the Kindle.
On the face of it, the rise of such technology has the potential to democratise the publishing process.
British author Mark Edwards gave up on his dream of writing a bestseller years ago when his finished thrillers failed to attract the attention of publishers.
Mark Edwards takes 35% of the sale price of his e-books
But when Edwards, who is the marketing director of a student finance website, bought an e-book reader last autumn and heard about Amazon's free direct publication system, he sensed a second chance.
His first novel, Killing Cupid, is still in the top 10.
See review of Killing Cupid
The blurb for Killing Cupid was re written to make it a lot more commercial and straightforward and within an hour sales doubled.
"It's extraordinary and really unexpected,"
Killing Cupid is currently selling 550 copies every day.
Killing Cupid on Amazon UK