Prince Harry and Meghan Markle "completely underestimated" what life would be like outside the Royal Family, a royal author has claimed.
The couple quit as senior working royals more than two years ago to live a new financially independent life in California with their children.
They've signed multi-million dollar deals with the likes of Netflix and Spotify - but so far have released little content.
And now, royal author Tina Brown, who has just released the explosive royal book The Palace Papers, says Harry and Meghan are having trouble leveraging their royal brand.
Speaking in a video interview with the Washington Post, Brown says they didn't know what it would be like without the Palace's advisors and PR team to help them.
She explained: "I think they both complete underestimate what it was going to be like without the Palace platform.
"However much the hated, and I think they really did, the constraints and the pettiness, essentially they conceived, of the Palace and the advisors - trying doing it without the Palace advisors, right?
"Because what the Palace does, of course, it has an amazing convening power, there's no one who won't take a phone call from Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace, they've got a huge convening power.
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"Every invitation in the world comes through that conduit and private secretaries can just sift and say what about appearing this, or why don't you do this?
"All of that is now gone and they have to have PRs do that for them and their judgement is not necessarily the best judgement.
"They are trying to leverage the royal brand and there is no PR who really knows how to do that better than Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace."
Meanwhile, Brown also credited Meghan with giving Harry the "tools to leave" the Firm and said they were keen to capitalise on striking celebrity deals.
She added: " “I really think Harry wanted out, himself… Meghan gave Harry the tools to leave.
"She understood the world of agents and deals. I mean this wasn’t Harry’s world, but suddenly he had in Meghan a very worldly strategist who he decided to trust above all the other advisors…
“They wanted to be able to have a commercial arm to their activities… Meghan certainly saw deals that were there to be made that they had to leave on the table because they were royals… It was as if Meghan couldn’t resist everything that was on offer on the celebrity buffet.”
Brown's book The Palace Papers contains countless shocking allegations about the Queen and the rest of the royal family.
It covers everything from Prince Charles's unusual bathroom demands and requests that his shoelaces are ironed, to insight into the Duchess of Cambridge's difficult relationship with her sister-in-law, Meghan.
