The scarecrow and Matthew Reilly

Matthew Reilly is one of Australia’s most successful exports, he AK47s the breeze with Jonathan Jackson.

There were no purring panthers audible in the background, no cracking Kalishnikovs firing at rapid rate, no mention of buried treasure, no flying mag hooks, ice stations or early 30-year-old heroes co-signed Scarecrow. There was just Matthew Reilly, the bespectacled anti literary establishment action author – the voice of the entertainment generation.

What makes Matthew Reilly so appealing is that he doesn’t take the literary world too seriously – he has few pretensions and a healthy cynicism towards self-important literati. Reilly recognises that there needs to exist a balance between art and entertainment, and he knows that art and entertainment possess commercial realities. He has been blessed with an
entrepreneurial flair that has fuelled the birth of several business ventures, but more importantly put him on the world stage.

 

First Contact – 6 July, 14.30 hours

I’d read enough to know that Matthew Reilly was media and fan friendly and I knew he was entrepreneurial, but when I called him in that first week of July, I also found out the lengths he went to get his first book published. And it was impressive.

“They weren’t a company that promoted themselves as publishers of published books. They did company brochures, prospectuses that sort of stuff,” says Matthew of the print company he’d hired to publish his first book – Contest. “I wanted to do a paperback novel and they didn’t even know what the size of a paperback novel was.”

So Matthew unleashed his ruler from its holster and measured a Michael Crichton paperback. It measured at 11 by 18 centimetres. “I said ‘This is how big it’ll be, and then I designed the cover and pretty much brought everything to them.’ “Says Mathew”. Every page was printed from Microsoft Word, in the right size and with the right page numbers and then photocopied by the printer and bound. The self-published version of first book Contest (about an intergalactic combat to the death) was ready for sale. There was only one problem, no publisher would touch it.

Reilly stood to lose $8,000, the cost of 1,000 copies. His friend’s father invested $2,500, he borrowed $5,000 and pulled $500 out of his own savings. I got a loan from the NSW Credit Union.” It was just a personal loan, he remembers the person at the desk looking at his application, which said ‘self publish book’, cocking their head and going ‘yeah’. As long as I had the payslips there, it didn’t matter, but I was working at a bar and I figured if I didn’t sell a copy, I’d be paying $65 a fortnight for the next four years.”

Reilly wrote Contest over a 12-month period while studying law. It was the research that stimulated his writing. “Whenever I’m learning something my writing thrives,” he says. “I love to learn new things. University and writing worked well together.”

Into the publishing temple

Reilly’s entrepreneurial flair was first evidenced in getting his self-published first ‘masterpiece’ into the shops. Without the help of an agent, or publishing house backing, Reilly approached the bookstores himself and convinced them to stock his book. “I was lucky that the manager of the first bookstore I went to called Read and Write (a Chatswood store that no longer exists) gave me an education in what bookstores require and expect. I got a good lesson in the language, but most stores are and were autonomous, so I’d speak to the manager and in one case at Angus and Robertson where the book was discovered, the manager had given a copy to one of his staff members who liked science fiction and asked the staff member to tell him if it was any good. In other cases like Dymocks they
have a central buyer who makes recommendations to franchisees, so I had to go through the hierarchy to be recommended.” One bookstore, Maxells, which is also now redundant, ordered 50 copies, five for each of their stores – Matthew’s biggest order.

The first real contact with a heavy hitter occurred when Macmillan editor Cate Paterson stumbled on the book while rifling through the stock at Angus and Roberston. After his research he knew what terms he could negotiate and received the standard deal of 10% for his next book Ice Station. “The deal I got for Ice Station was $6,000. My first contract was divided into three payments; two thousand on signing, two on delivery and two on publication. I signed that deal in February or March in 1997 and Ice Station wasn’t published until August 1998, so that $6,000 had to stretch nearly 18 months.”

However, Reilly says that the first $2,000 cheque was the “most delightful cheque I’ve ever received.” It was reward for the effort, determination and hard work he had to apply. If you make your own luck, Reilly made it tenfold.

So where and when did the entrepreneur surface? Was it at St Aloysius College where he spent his high school years, was it his parents’ influence, or a combination of both? Reilly puts it down to his school years, although his parents offered something just as valuable – teaching him to think like an adult.

“It’s funny, he says, “my parents are two of the most conservative people you’ll ever meet. Neither is entrepreneurial; my dad works for the Department of Corrective Services and my mother was a high school maths teacher, but the biggest thing they’ve been involved in is the local amateur theatre company. I went in some early shows, but I was working with adults and that taught me to think like an adult from a very young age.”
Back at private school St Aloysius, Matthew was being exposed to entrepreneurs. One such fellow was a property developer who had bought decrepit office buildings, renovated them, and then sold them. It was just one of the many entrepreneurial ventures he was exposed to. “So, if I was to give an answer of where the entrepreneurial flair came from, it was the exposure that I received at school from business people. I’m an inveterate watcher; I watch and learn all the time. Often people who have said something to me five or six years ago will find their comments in a book.”

The exposure also taught him the meaning of the word success, and that there should be no fear of failure. “I think that’s where being young and naïve is an absolute advantage.” So with no fear Reilly launched his career as an author in much the same way he played out high school – there was no middle ground, just the attitude to do things differently. “I was very strong academically and I was a good sportsman, which helps in any high school environment, but the big thing that I really rebelled against was this notion that you should stay in the middle, that you shouldn’t try too hard  or succeed. That’s why I wanted to be different and didn’t care what people thought of me. I have said in speeches I’ve given to schools that you’ll never regret it more than if you stunt your own abilities based on comments made by someone you’ll never see again. A lot of people are conformist because they are afraid of what people will say, but I was happy to be different.”

Different strokes

Matthew Reilly has continued to buck the trends. There was the book he wrote for free for the Australian government’s Books Alive program in August 2005. The government handed out a quarter of a million copies in that month. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s great business to give out a free sample of your work. And despite the fact that I’d just finished Seven Ancient Wonders and was on a tight schedule, I squeezed in Hell Island and pumped out what I thought was a good little action book. If the federal government wanted to give out a quarter of a million free samples of my stuff and I could help them with a reading promotion, that’s good business. If you give something out for free, people will respond.”

He also printed HoverCraft Racer for free, which he made available via the Internet. He wasn’t the first author to have done this. Stephen King tried and failed with the first book after his horrific car accident. “I think if Stephen King did it now, it would be a much different story. It was just too early in the Net’s life,” explains Reilly. “The other thing I think is that it has to be free. So I based my model for HoverCar Racer on commercial radio and television.” This meant that Reilly sought sponsorship for the book, which wasn’t an easy process despite his reputation. His sponsors came from contacts. “I approached HSBC, I approached MINI. I went down to Melbourne and had a meeting with the marketing person at BMW to no avail. I knew a fellow at Canon, who knew of my books and a fellow at Macmillan who knew someone at film distribution company UIP . It was tough but personal contacts make a big difference.”

So UIP and Canon took the header and footer and Reilly published on the Net, free for readers but paid for by UIP, who used it to plug The Bourne Supremacy. “For me the key to the Net is to have it for free. You don’t want to have a buck or two dollars fifty on your credit card, which is what Stephen King needed to do. In the end I had to make sure booksellers weren’t going to be alienated. I said ‘Listen, it will come off the Net eventually and be released as a hardback’.”

The Internet has played a major part in Reilly’s success. He sees it as the portal between himself and his fans with its primary function being to allow his fans to contact him. Like his books, the website is constantly moving and he is about to launch the Reilly Review, a movie and book review section. “I always get people asking what I would recommend to see or read, and I was inspired because I read a New York Times review of Superman Returns which I thought was wrong, so I’m going to review the reviewers to hopefully give my readers some interaction. Another thing I’ve done differently, and Cate Paterson deserves credit for this, are the interviews at the back of my books. At the very end of each book, with the exception of Ice Station, there’s a little interview, which when I meet readers at book signings they really feel like they know me. It’s about making yourself accessible to those people who shell out $35 to buy your book.”

Like any good entrepreneur Reilly knows that selling is about customer service. He bemoans the lack of respect some authors have for their audience, those who won’t do any promotions, or book signings. “You have to go out there and meet them and give them something of yourself. That’s something I pride myself on. I don’t believe that I am the best writer at work in this country at the moment, but I do believe I’m in the top three hardest working. I will work harder and longer than anybody else to make sure the job is done. Whether it’s writing the book or going out and selling the book, which is why I think the government asked me to write Hell Island because they wanted somebody out there who could go out and represent the book industry.”

Reilly puts his hard work ethic down to his rivalry with his brother. “I would play my older brother in a small version of tennis in our driveway and he would always let me get five love up and then he’d beat me. I learned to just dig my heels and claws in and hang in and try to beat him.” He always wanted to do well and enjoyed success. “By succeeding you make yourself different.”

Reilly is now working on his next book and has plans for a complete adventure series, but he will always be set apart by
his ability to acknowledge commercial reality. “The fact remains that a publishing house is a business,” he says. “It has to make money and if it has authors who are not making money, it can’t keep them. The publisher needs to be in the black by the end of the year, otherwise there’s no author.”

He also feels that Internet publishing will soon be the way of the future. While there will always be those who treasure the hard cover, as future generations become more savvy with technology, E-books will rise.

As the interview concludes there’s still no mention of mag hooks or the sound of the Kalishnikov, just the whir of wind through the mobile phone he’s holding at the end of the line. But you get the sense that if he could live his characterisation for just one day, he would. He thinks as quickly as Scarecrow would with a pistol pointed at his temple. He’s a smart guy who knows the value of a good line.

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