This is number 6 in the 7-part Authorship is a Business blog series. Be sure to study the previous entries starting on June 21, 2012. Topics include write the right book for the right audience, the benefits of writing a book proposal, how to write with your audience in mind, resources for studying the publishing industry and your publishing options. Today’s topic—hiring a book editor.
Do you consider yourself a pretty good writer? Do you understand what makes for interesting, reader-friendly text? Can you tell a good story and/or write clear instructions?
If you’re like many authors, you can write fairly legibly but you just aren’t wired for the process of editing. You don’t realize that you have developed some bad habits in your writing. You don’t recognize all of your punctuation and grammatical mistakes. You may even miss the typos and computer-generated mistakes that have occurred throughout the process of writing.
The truth is that most authors need help when it comes to fine-tuning their manuscripts. More and more publishers require that authors hire a professional editor before submitting anything to them. And an unedited book produced through a “self-publishing” company will surely die amidst the competition. If it gets any book reviews, they will not be favorable. Booksellers won’t give it a second look. And readers will lose respect for an author who puts out a book that’s full of blatant mistakes.
Hey, you’re an author, not an editor. There is a difference, you know. I’ve edited manuscripts for some highly educated authors and journalism majors. Some of them were stuck in antiquity—before technology began to dictate certain editorial changes. Others simply had been fostering bad habits. And some just didn’t know all of the tried and true rules of good writing, good grammar and proper punctuation.
How can you tell if you need an editor for your manuscript?
I suggest contacting an editor or two. Find out how much they charge for evaluating your manuscript. Some editors will run an occasional special for manuscript evaluation. Or they’ll evaluate a portion of your manuscript for free. If they charge, it’s generally around $50 or $100 to evaluate your first 25 or 40 pages, for example.
What kind of evaluation do you want? Would you like the editor’s opinion as to whether your book is publishable? In this case, she would probably want to see the complete manuscript and the fee may be more like $250, depending on the size of your project. For this type of evaluation, you’ll need to work with an editor with strong publishing background, not a friend who is good with words.
Maybe you want the editor to look at your manuscript from an editorial standpoint. Does it need editing? What is the nature of the editing problems? Can she give you some examples showing how she would remedy these problems? What would she charge for editing your entire manuscript? Again, I would recommend an experienced book editor, not your son’s high school English teacher
Of course, it would benefit you to learn what you can about self-editing book manuscripts in this digital age. Basically, you’ll want to watch for the following:
• Too many spaces between sentences. It is now one space after all punctuation.
• A dangling em dash. The em dash now connects the two words—it no longer dangles between them.
• The proper use of the apostrophe.
• The proper use of quotation marks and single quotes.
• Errors that your spell check missed.
• Muddy writing.
• Redundancies.
• Incorrect use of common words.
• Poorly organized story or nonfiction book.
• Inconsistency in your choices regarding spelling, capitalization, etc.
• Passive instead of active writing.
• Inconsistent and unreasonable voice and tense.
The more errors and problems you find while self-editing, indicates a greater need for an editor. If you are not aware of errors in your manuscript, this could mean that you are not wired to see them. Hire a professional book editor.
There are hundreds of people who have hung out their editing shingles since the explosion of new authors came on the scene starting around 1996. And there are as many approaches and fee structures. Get references. Ask for a sample edit so you can see how the editor works and the types of suggestions he or she will make.
If you are writing a book, start now setting aside money to use in hiring an editor. How much will you need? Editors charge anywhere from $30/hour to 60/hour. For a manuscript of 80,000 words, you might pay anywhere from $800 to $3,000, depending on how much work (time) is involved.
Be wary of editors that charge too little. I edit both fiction and nonfiction book manuscripts. One author came to me for an estimate. Later, she emailed me and said that I really should adjust my fees because she just found someone who would edit her 250-page manuscript for $300. This editor figured it would take something like six hours. Say what? That’s over forty pages per hour. A really fast reader might be able to read forty pages in an hour, but editing is a completely different animal.
This woman came back to me some weeks later and said, “I should have hired you to edit my book. The editor I hired for $300, simply did a quick computer spell check. I’m left with no money and an unedited manuscript.