Vincent de Paul has built a publishing business on a proposition: authors should retain ownership of their work, including copyright and subsidiary rights.
“Every author we have worked with owns their book outright—copyright in their own name, every right attached to it, undivided,” says de Paul, founder of Mystery Publishers Limited, which marks its tenth anniversary.
Registered on September 16, 2016, the firm has published 70 titles by debut authors, offering services without claiming ownership.
In our model, the author is the publisher
“In our model, the author is the publisher. They commission us the way you would commission an architect,” he explains. Authors pay for editing, design, printing and distribution while retaining their rights and production files.
The model offers self-publishing services, but not every manuscript is accepted. “We are not a print shop. We turn manuscripts down. Where our name appears on a spine, it means the work met an editorial standard.
Paying us buys professional work. It does not buy our endorsement,” he says. The idea grew from de Paul’s frustration as a writer unable to find a publisher for his manuscript.
I went into publishing because I could not
“I went into publishing because I could not find a publisher,” he says. Several houses rejected his work, citing poetry’s limited market or its absence from the school syllabus.
Eventually, he gave up, leaving his manuscript unpublished. He realised many writers faced the same predicament.
“It dawned on me: nobody was going to publish any of them, and when those people died, their stories were going to die with them.”
He believes Kenya’s publishing industry is weakened by its reliance on schoolbook procurement.
The Kenyan publishing industry was organised almost entirely
“The Kenyan publishing industry was organised almost entirely around school procurement. To me, that was not literature, but a supply chain.”
It has published authors from Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
De Paul says it has never borrowed, taken donor funding or accumulated unsold stock, relying on freelancers.
“We will not fail because we published a bad book. We will fail with a store full of good ones and a printer’s invoice we cannot meet,” he says.
Its services include digital publishing, audiobooks, children’s books, creative-writing training and anthologies.
Finding readers remains difficult because of weak distribution,
Finding readers remains difficult because of weak distribution, shrinking book-review pages and limited bookshop space.
“We use social media as our primary channel, and we are building a book-review and discovery platform for African titles, because a book nobody writes about is a book nobody finds.”
Authors must also market their work. “A writer who hands over a manuscript and considers the job finished has just killed their writing career.”
He disputes the claim that Kenyans do not
He disputes the claim that Kenyans do not read, pointing to newspapers, scripture, WhatsApp forwards and social media.
The challenge, he argues, is that reading is treated as an exam chore rather than pleasure, while book prices compete with household needs.
On artificial intelligence, de Paul says the firm does not publish AI-generated works. “AI is a fine tool and a poor author,” he says.
You can use it to brainstorm and do
“You can use it to brainstorm and do quality checks, but the actual writing is yours.” The firm also established the Afrika Redefined Indie Book Prize to recognise self-published titles often excluded from mainstream literary competitions.
Funding challenges have postponed the 2026 edition. De Paul hopes to build a Pan-African publishing group with stronger distribution, translation programmes and expanded digital and audio catalogues.
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