Finding Your Own Professional Editor
Author: Gary Kessler
Date: 26-03-03
If you have sufficient training and talent to be publishing your
book or article, you really should not need to engage the services of a
professional editor before you submit your manuscript to an agent or publisher.
The strength of your writing and ability to tell a story should shine
through minor content and style problems in your manuscript, and traditional
publishers have editors of their own to polish the manuscripts they contract
to publish.
However, there may be situations where a pre-submission edit is appropriate:
- You feel a professional edit would enhance the salability of your
manuscript.
- An agent feels you need to have the manuscript edited before approaching
publishers.
- A publisher is only interested in publishing the work if you make
revisions that you need the help of a professional editor to accomplish.
- If you are self-publishing or contracting the services of a book production
company (e.g., a POD producer or a vanity press), you will probably
have to arrange for and pay for the edit of the book yourself.
With the current deluge of well-written manuscripts in the publishing
market, agents and publishers do, indeed, expect work to be more highly
polished than ever before.
So, what can you do if you think your manuscript needs
an edit?
You can find a fresh set of eyes to review your manuscript. Ask literary
or well read friends to read your work, make suggestions and point out
possible grammar, spelling, and punctuation problems. Or ask for recommendations
from other authors, local publishers or university creative writing programs.
You can also find editors listed in the publisher’s “bible”
of publishing services, The Literary Marketplace. This large, two-volume
set published annually is available in the reference section of most public
libraries. Or, with a wary eye, you can do an Internet search for editorial
help.
Fnding Editorial Services Online
Reliable editorial services that can be contacted via the Internet include:
- www.the-efa.org - The Editorial
Freelancers Association site. The association has training and experience
requirements for membership and a job board where you can list jobs
(for at least $15/hour). The website also now has a listing of members
who you can approach directly.
- www.consulting-editors.com
- editorialdepartment.net
- www.copyeditor.com - A less
reliable Internet job board where you can advertise for an editor. Credentialed
editors do check this website, but there is nothing to keep those with
no experience or ability from bidding for editorial jobs. If you use
this service, it is doubly important that you ask for and verify credentials.
Choosing the Right Editor
When editor hunting, pay attention to the type of editor you think you
need and the credentials and experience in working with books similar
to yours of the editors you are researching.
Book and journal/magazine article editing is a specialty. The publishing
industry has highly specialized style and format preferences that don’t
match college-level English rules. Someone who is a college English teacher
or a technical or newspaper editor may not have the right qualifications
to be editing for the book publishing world.
In addition, the different genres and categories of book publishing are
specialized. Look to engage an editor who has demonstrable editing experience
in the appropriate genre or category.
What Type of Editor Do You Need?
The type of editor you need depends on what you need done with your manuscript:
- If you are looking for an evaluation of the marketability of your
book or for advice on the structure or content of your book, you need
a substantive editor. Those with experience as acquisitions editors
in publishing houses have good credentials for this type of editing.
Experienced literary agents also often do well with this.
- If you are looking for someone to do a complete overhaul of the
content and structure of your book, you need a book doctor. This
specialty requires considerable writing talent and experience in the
specific genre or category of the book. So look for evidence of work
on published books in your genre or category.
- If you are looking for an editor to clean up the style and format
of your manuscript, engage the services of one with formal training
in book publishing and experience in books in your genre or category
that were actually published by traditional publishers. Although
literary agents often offer to help clean up the style and format of
manuscripts, few are actually credentialed to do so.
Learn From Your Editor
If you do bite the bullet and pay for any type of edit, spend a good
deal of time examining what was done in that edit. Try to observe and
absorb the restyling the editor did of your work; you should be able to
work these techniques into your next work yourself.
How Much to Pay
Book editing, like many businesses, has an unregulated, “what the
market will bear” payment structure. However, publicized rate structures
are often significantly more than what editorial services are willing
to work for - and most certainly more than publishers pay for these services.
Private clients should be able to find a good editor by offering payment
within accepted ranges. Claims of $40/hour and $60/hour pay structures
are common. But academic and small publishers generally pay $15-$20/hour
for regular copyediting, while larger trade publishers pay $18-$25/hour.
Publishers generally pay $22-$27/hour for substantive editors.
Ghost writers are usually paid by the book, and their payment is often
indexed to the projected sales of the book (which itself is often indexed
to the existing celebrity of the “author”).
The general copyediting rate is considered to be seven or eight pages
(depending on the condition of the syntax) of standard manuscript copy
per hour.
A standard manuscript page is considered to be:
- the normal 8 1/2 X 11-inch page and margin settings provided by computer
word processing programs,
- using 12-point font in either Courier or New Times Roman (hint: New
Times Roman uses fewer pages than Courier),
- with everything double spaced,
- and extra line spaces only between chapters and sections.
Estimating Editing Costs
To estimate how much your edit should cost, divide the number of standard
manuscript pages by both seven and eight, which gives you a range of the
estimated number of editing hours, and multiply by the hourly rate. Most
editorial services will add three or four hours to the time to cover the
preparation of general notes. They will negotiate who pays for delivery
costs if hardcopies need to be exchanged.
Copyright 2003 Gary Kessler. All rights reserved.
Gary Kessler, a frequent contributor to the WritersNet discussion board, is
a novelist and freelance book editor who has edited more than eighty-five published
books for some twenty traditional publishers since 1997. He has worked inside
both trade and academic publishing houses and has released books of his own
in traditional publishing, POD-production, and electronic publishing forms.
He is the editor of the two-volume Writer’sNet Anthology of Prose,
which was released in 2002. Gary’s previous career was with the U.S. Government’s
foreign media news agency, for which he served in embassies in East Asia and
the Mediterranean and also served as the news agency’s managing editor.
He provides writing and publishing tips for authors on his professional website
at www.editsbooks.com.
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