Confessions of an Author

Indie authors are often advised to hire an editor. Advise is the kindest verb I can find for some of those recommendations.

I do not hire an editor for my novels because

1. I am a career editor with over 25 years of experience in editing and managing editors and writers. A well-known literary agent told me that I had the cleanest manuscript he'd ever seen.

2. I could never afford to hire me.

Obviously, I believe editing is important. If I didn't, a lightning bolt would have my name on it. But editing isn't a one-time process or a one-time expense.

The Cost of Editing

Professional editing is expensive because it's labor-intensive. Editors with years or decades of experience may charge considerably more than the average.

The following chart compares the three main types of manuscript editing, Reedsy's average projected costs, and the hourly rates I charged when I last offered editing services. All three types of edits are important parts of the process, but whether you need all of them depends on you, your manuscript, and your budget. The Editorial Freelancers Association's suggested rates are very specific and too extensive to cover in this post; I suggest checking them out.

Types of editing	Reedsy average cost per 1000 words	My hourly editing rates Estimated hours vary with the manuscript's condition and are based on industry standards.
Developmental Editing	$36	$50 50 to 120+ hours  Calculated at 500 to 1,500 words per hour
Copyediting	$27	$35 30 to 75 hours Calculated at 1,000 to 2,500 words per hour.
Proofreading	$20	$30 20 to 30 hours Calculated at 2,500 to 4,000 words per hour

My current project is 74,000 words. If I total the cost for all three types of editing at Reedsy's average rates, it would be $6,142. If I hired myself, it would range from $4,150 for a fairly clean manuscript to $9,525 for a manuscript needing a lot of work.

Any way you look at it, editing is a huge expense. My current print book profit is about $10 per book, and half that if they're sold through Amazon. At that rate, I'd need to sell between 415 and 953 print books at $10 profit per copy just to break even on editing costs. At $5 profit per copy through Amazon, I'd need twice as many.

Berrett-Koehler Publishers estimates, using BookScan sales figures, that the average book sells fewer than 300 print copies through U.S. retail channels over its lifetime. Self-published books pull that average down, but traditionally published books also sell surprisingly few copies.

Before you self-edit or hire an editor

Whichever way you go, you need to recognize good advice — and bad advice. And, believe me, there's a lot of "bad" advice.

Human editors make mistakes and have biases. For example, the Oxford Comma War is fierce, and the battlefield is littered with writers and editors who died defending their choice. It's good to know which side you're on ahead of time.

Grammar-checking tools aren't infallible either. Sometimes they make a suggestion that's perfectly reasonable . . . 95% of the time. That other 5% will get you every time. They have also definitely chosen one side over the other in the Oxford Comma War.

I can't count how many times a grammar checker has flagged something and suggested a hilarious change that completely misses the point. I laugh and dismiss the suggestion.

I have a degree in Rhetoric, but if you need a refresher, plenty of online grammar courses are available. Grammar Girl has helped many writers. Consider buying The Chicago Manual of Style; not all its guidance applies to fiction, but much of it does.

If you decide to become your own editor

Here's the process I use. I hope you find it useful.

Put distance between your final draft and your first edit

I leave a month between the final development draft and the editing draft. The month isn't merely about resting my eyes. By then, my high-school crush on the project has cooled, and I have time to get out of writer mode and into editor mode. I no longer think, "God, this is brilliant," and can ask, "Why the hell am I saying the same thing ... three times in three different ways in the same paragraph? And where did the period at the end of that sentence go?"

Invest in editing tools

Yes, they can make mistakes, but they also take a lot of grunt work out of editing. Note: I write in Word, format in Atticus, and publish in KDP.

Editing software can be a relatively modest investment. I use three different tools:

Word Spelling and Grammar. It's lame and misses a lot of issues that practically scream to be fixed. But it's free and does a good first pass.

Grammarly and ProWritingAid don't catch the same things. PWA catches things Grammarly doesn't, and vice versa. They both flag many more issues than Word.

All three occasionally make suggestions that prove the software has no idea what I'm saying. I am particularly amused when they want to rewrite Shakespeare.

Run the editing tools as you write

OK, I advised you to put a distance between your final draft and your official editing draft. I'm not backtracking. However, all three grammar checkers catch errors as I make them. I correct them as they occur because nothing's more disheartening than opening my editing draft and having one of the tools report 597 errors.

The Process

This process starts after my developmental edit. (The developmental edit needs its own post.)

1. Freeze the milestone. After I finish developmental editing (about a month for my last novel), I save the completed draft as DateDEVDraftMBK. That draft is my archaeological layer, and I don't touch it again. I create a new working file, DateCopyEditMBK.

2. Take the break I mentioned previously.

3. Release the software hounds. I manually search for double spaces and other mechanical annoyances, then run Word, Grammarly, and ProWritingAid. I read the manuscript on-screen, make corrections, and run additional reports, such as Overused Words. Then I repeat the grammar checks and on-screen proofreading. Yes, again.

4. Save a dated copy every day that you work on the copyedit draft, in case something happens. Something almost always happens.

   

5. Change the way you experience the manuscript. I use Word's Read Aloud feature to catch what my eyes miss and to hear awkward phrasing. Then I print the manuscript and proofread it on paper. It's amazing what suddenly becomes obvious in print. I make corrections, run the grammar checkers again, and do a final on-screen proofread.

6. Move to Atticus. I import the manuscript into my formatting software, where Grammarly and ProWritingAid invariably find something they missed the first twenty times in the Word manuscript. I also run Atticus reports, including checks for straight and curly quotation marks, and check the pagination.

7. Proofread the formatted book. I print the formatted Atticus manuscript and read it yet again, making whatever corrections are necessary.

Then, I'm more or less done, although KDP will flag what it thinks are errors when you import your vigorously edited manuscript.

Accept that there will be errors

There's a popular — and apparently apocryphal — story that Persian rug makers intentionally break a pattern or misplace a color because Islamic belief holds that only God (Allah) is perfect.

The editors who worked for me had their own version of that story. Gremlins in the manuscript won't allow the errors to drop below a certain number.

Nobody knows what that number is.

You can make the errors less fatal or embarrassing, but you can't get rid of all the errors, because as soon as you fix one, another pops up. Accept that two spaces between words is better than calling your protagonist by the name you abandoned in the second draft. Gremlin errors typically announce themselves long after you can do anything about them.

FYI: We developed the gremlin theory while producing technical documentation that was reviewed by peer writers, editors, developers, marketing, and legal . . . somehow the gremlins still won.

Whether you hire the best editor known to humankind or edit yourself vigorously, errors happen.