A petty penny

SPECIAL FEATURE : LITERATURE

A petty penny

Ravi Dayal

Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy may have fetched him a huge advance from his UK publishers, but his income is no index of the earnings of the average Indo-English writers. There is little money in Indo-English writing and the sales of even the best-known writers are far from staggering. Shobha De, whose novels are super bestsellers by Indian standards, sells 30,000 copies a book on an average. Her sole rival is Khushwant Singh, though apart from Delhi he has published no fiction in recent years. After all the hype, A Suitable Boy sold 25,000 copies in hardback.

Two other books regarded as great commercial successes, which have gone into eight and ten impressions respectively, are Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August. Yet their sales have been between 18,000 and 20,000 copies.
The average first print run for a new author is 1,000 copies in hardback, and later--if the hardback sells out--2,000 to 3,000 in paperback. "To print and sell 1,000 hardback copies requires an investment of Rs 30,000 to 40,000 excluding labour charges," says Ravi Dayal. "If you price the book correctly and manage to sell the entire consignment in six to eight months, you can make a small profit."
"If we sell 500 copies in hardback of a first novel, we consider it a success," says David Davidar. "In paperback the average sales are around 2,000 copies," mostly in Mumbai and Delhi. "It’s very sad, really," says Pankaj Mishra. "There is glamour in authorship, but no money. I don’t expect the market to expand enormously, either. We were all deluded about the demand when we began."

David Davidar

The authors too admit that it is impossible to live off their writing alone. "If you publish only in India, you cannot be a full-time writer," says Mukul Kesavan who teaches in Delhi. "But if you publish abroad, too, while continuing to live in India the exchange rate of rupee against the dollar or the pound can bring in a fair amount."
"A publisher abroad would think nothing of giving you an advance of 1,500 pounds if he accepts your manuscript," agrees Chatterjee. "It is a very modest advance by his standards. For us it is more than Rs 75,000! That is why our writers are so keen to publish abroad: the readership we write for is here, but the money is there."

With the exception of Seth, none of the novelists published abroad has opted for full-time writing. Says Shobha De, who is married to shipping tycoon Dilip De: "Had I to support myself, which fortunately I don’t, I could never have dreamed of living off my novels." She writes three newspaper columns a week, and is scripting the popular TV serial Swabhiman.
Journalism, often regarded as poorly paid, is far more lucrative than fiction writing in India. "Tara Lane, which took over a year to write, and even longer to get published, earned me around Rs 18,000," says Shama Futehally. "A 600-word book review, which takes a few hours and comparatively negligible mental effort, brings in Rs 1,800."
Not surprisingly, virtually every Indian writer in English has some other steady source of livelihood. "A full-time job does slow down the pace of one’s writing," agrees Chatterjee who is in the IAS, "but it also helps because it keeps one free from pressure. To produce something worthwhile, one must take a Hindu view of writing, one must not be pressured by time. The important thing is to do a good job, no matter how long that takes. And that would not be possible if I was writing for money, was dependent on my writing for my livelihood. Today I write only because I enjoy writing." The contrary view is expressed by Ashok Banker, who quit a well-paid advertising job to devote himself to full-time novel writing. "If you have a job it means the best hours of your day are devoted to doing something other than writing. Your writing gets done at odd moments squeezed out of a hectic schedule, either early in the morning or late at night," Banker notes. "And some days, when the schedule gets too hectic, no writing gets done at all. I couldn’t live with that frustration of not writing. So in 1990, I took the decision to quit."
And how did he manage? He didn’t. "I have this flat which my mother left me," he says. "I sold one room of the flat to my neighbour. This brought in a fair amount, and enabled me to carry on. When that money got used up, I was seriously thinking of selling one of my kidneys. I’d read you can get up to Rs 1 lakh for doing so, which would have kept me going for another year or two."
What bailed him out was script-writing: he is the author of India’s first English TV serial, A Mouthful of Sky. As he says, "Ashok Banker the script writer is subsidising Ashok Banker the novelist."

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