Like everyone else, when two or three authors meet at the end of the financial year in March, they talk about money — that is, the royalties they expect for their books. Most authors know what is coming, plus or minus 10 per cent. So, when they talk about money, what they are really talking about is the time it takes for accounts to be audited and for writers to receive their dues; how long it would take to improve their royalty earnings in the coming financial year, and complete whatever projects they have in mind. All writers know that there is no book of quality that is not the product of overtime, of productivity without bonus.

This raises two questions. One, why do Indian publishers take so long to pay royalties — usually never before the end of June? Second, how much time does it take to deliver a work of quality, given that only a minority of authors can live on the money they earn from their books and must have salaried jobs to survive?

All Indian publishers, big or small, have computerized their inventories, sales and receipts, the value of stock and royalties to be paid to each author on the list. Yet, there is a gap of at least three months before royalties are paid. Publishers say this is because auditing takes time. This is only partly true because with computerized data and spot checking of stocks, the entire operation can be completed in a few days.

The real reason lies in the nature of the retail trade, which runs entirely on credit. Normally, books are sold on 30-day’s credit from the date of invoice, but in practice, this works out to 60 days or more. As for sales to universities and colleges, 120 days would be doing very well indeed. In fact, the situation is so grim that big publishers and wholesalers have suspended direct sales to educational institutions in the Hindi heartland. The situation is not much better elsewhere.

In other words, publishers are always cash strapped. So when the royalty bill is added to the fixed expenditure on establishment and wages, they need time to collect their dues from the market. This isn’t easy because the retailers have to chase the institutions, which in turn are waiting for the next year’s grants. The author simply has to wait.

Just how much time it takes to turn out a work of quality depends on the kind of book the author is working on. For fiction, which requires a sustained imagination, there can be no fixed time frame: imagination has to wait upon memory to reveal itself. Hemingway once said that every writer must have a “built-in, shock-proof shit-detector” but there are times when the writer is “blocked” and the shit-detector dialled down to zero. He has to wait for the words to come back to him.

Non-fiction is easier to time-frame, especially if the author has research and secretarial assistance. Unlike in the West, Indian publishers simply don’t have the money to provide such resources. The advances are meagre, just enough to cover the stationary and travel expenses. Therefore, it is unfair to ask for a rigid time-frame for delivering the typescript. Some allowances must be built into the contract.

So, an independent writer should be willing to be relatively poor for much longer than most professionals. Above all, he should buy time for doing long things by getting through the short ones.