In 1996 an Aussie law student took out a bank loan to print 1,000 copies of his first novel after it was rejected by major publishers. Matthew Reilly has now sold 8 million books and directed his own ...

“I was so young and brimming with confidence that I never thought it could fail,” he says of the time he went from bookshop to bookshop, hand-selling his first, self-published novel. And he was right.

With boxes of the book Contest stored in the backroom of his parents’ house, he approached retailers and managed to convince them to stock it on their shelves, including the former flagship Angus & ...