Hey, so I'm just wandering around this site absorbing the info and slowly reading the stickies and I read this one. Sorry if it is too old or my comment is wrong.
It just came into my head and I got thinking about her and how she might fit on this list and I'll share because it's interesting.
Dewi Lestari
This is the story as I remember it.
Before she published Supernova she was already a singer in a successful band.
She asked someone how many copies she could publish with a certain amount of money and paid to have that many printed.
Her books came back from the publishers with the footnotes wrong and she didn't know that she had printed thousands more copies than a normal bestseller usually has printed in its first edition.
She then paid to have that many copies published again with the footnotes set correctly and dumped the entire load of books with messed up footnotes in the second hand book shops near the campuses. (Giving them away for free???)
She then had a book launch / concert at a big shopping centre selling the copies with the good footnotes.
Result: Her book was incredibly popular and she wrote a sequel and more and she is now one of the most famous authors in Indonesia.
In theory, her self-published book became incredibly popular because it was everywhere overnight and cheap and she already had music fans
BUT ALSO because it appealed to a new young generation emerging from harsh Suharto-era censorship in a country with a huge population but very few stories to buy that spoke to them.
I have found her in her own words in English here. (Scroll down quite a bit. Not sure how much I can post.)
I had to write an essay on her in Indonesian and at the time this ignorant first time author failure to success story was everywhere but now it is quite hard to find. I wonder if she is so famous now as a thinker that it doesn't fit.