Today I’m only going to talk about copyediting through a professional freelance editor. (See the definition below.)
Some of the things a copy editor can do for you: we can check your grammar, usage, and punctuation, but also suggest ways to smooth the flow of your novel or nonfiction while still maintaining the author’s voice; we can suggest ways to make certain points clearer that may not be clear enough–pointing out and correcting any inconsistencies in content.
When you decide to work with an editor, you’ll want to settle what the charges are, and how the charges will be paid. Many editors charge by the page or pages and many charge by the hour. Many editors will not confirm an estimate until they’ve seen the manuscript.
The professional freelance association–Editorial Freelancers Association–has the common editorial rates listed at their website. Some of those rates I’ll list here:
Type of work Estimated Pace Range of Fees
Copyediting, basic 5-10 ms pgs/hr $30-40/hr
Copyediting, heavy 2-5 ms pgs/hr $40-50/hr
Developmental editing 1-5 pgs/hr $60-80/hr
Substantive /Line editing 1-6 ms pgs/hr $50-60/hr
Proofreading 9-13 ms pgs/hr $30-35/hr
Depending on the client and the editor, an editor may charge more or less than the fees listed here. Obviously this is something that would be worked out between the two of them. The charge varies according to whether the copyediting will be light, medium or heavy.
I usually charge by the pages–an example: for copyediting, the charge would be about $30 per 10 pages. Many editors request an initial payment upfront for the work on a book, about half, and then a final payment upon completion, depending on the work to be done. I often work for authors before they submit proposals or manuscripts, whether to agents or to acquiring editors at a publishing house, or to editors at the Acceptance stage after the first Advance.
When you submit pages that aren’t completely polished or are in rough draft form, then the editing would most likely be developmental editing, since at this stage of the manuscript, we don’t know what will be scrapped or expanded.
If an author submits chapters to be copyedited, then the editor will read the chapters through several times–what we call “passes”–and when we’ve found all the mistakes and smoothed all the clunky sentences and so on, then we’ll send the chapters back to you. That would complete the editing for those chapters. We generally use the track changes function and the Comment function in MS Word to indicate or suggest changes that should be made. If there is a question about something, then the editor will query the author, probably by inserting a Comment in the manuscript.
However, if you revise and add new material to those same pages, and then resubmit those same chapters, then that would be considered new material and the author would be charged again for those chapters–an author doesn’t get carte blanche on chapters and on reworking them forever. That would be like going to the doctor and only paying them one fee for all complaints. However, an author and editor can agree to have the editor only look at certain pages if there is new material, when it doesn’t involve most of the previous work. But if an editor must look through all the pages to do the work necessary then the editor should be paid for the time and effort needed to do that work. Otherwise the editor could be working on someone else’s chapters and getting paid for that time and work.
Here are some editing terms for reference:
Developmental Editing: to develop a manuscript from concept and/ or draft– working through subsequent drafts–suggesting changes in content, organization and presentation.
Substantive Editing: Fiction: evaluates the elements of the novel: plot, viewpoint, characterization, narrative style, pacing, and so on. Nonfiction: improving presentation, organization, clarity, readability and flow, to create a new draft.
Copyediting: this is much more indepth than proofreading, and involves checking grammar, usage, capitalizations, punctuation, formating, and so on, yet preserving the voice & meaning of the original. Suggests ways to smooth the flow of the manuscript and checks for consistent style and format.
Proofreading: identifies typographical and punctuation errors, inconsistencies and misspellings. Checks for text discrepancies & problems with page layout. May compare two documents for uniformity.nges in content, organization and presentation.
This is a quick overview of the copyediting process. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to input them here.
Janice:
I”m not seeing aplace where I can subscibe to your blog. Let me know how.
ps – great info.