I have a friend who is doing freelace editing. She charges 0.03 per word, before tax. My book is 100000 words (or around), and she told me that the price for her editing would be 3,075 dollars. She told me this was on the low end of editing, is that true? I'm okay with doing my best to edit my own book (which I am I'd just like a second pair of eyes if possible.) But 3,000 dollars is not within my pay range. (Thanked her for going over the prices with me and told her I was sorry I couldn't.)
The average editing speed for a COPY EDIT is 6 pages an hour.
The industry standard for number of words on a page is 250 (this can change but this is the industry standard). So six pages equals 1500 words. So 1500 words an hour. An average novel is around 60,000 words. Divide that by 1500 and you get how many hours it will take on average to edit – which in this case is 40 hours.
This is for a copy edit.
Now because you’re not a horrible person you should want to pay your editor at least minimum wage which currently in the U.S. is $7.25 an hour – which is $290. Except even copy editing requires specialized skills so let’s bump that up to the new proposed minimum wage of $15.00 an hour. Which is $600 for a 60,000 word or 240-page manuscript.
THIS IS FOR COPY EDITING.
And this isn’t even the industry standard rate. the average copy edit rate is $36-41 per hour. (Source)
Higher levels of editing like Line editing, Content Editing, and Developmental Editing all take a higher degree of skill and expertise. As the linked article shows for Non-fiction/journalistic editing there’s a lot of things higher level editors have to be able to do. A lot of these kinds of edits require education and knowledge of the genre. This isn’t looking for comma faults or homophones. This is tightening up language, fixing plot holes, flagging and fixing characterization issues, and more. Not only does this take longer (4 pages an hour on average for a line edit, and 2 pages an hour for a content edit) but it costs more. This is a huge time commitment and work commitment for the editor. With a content edit, the editor may be literally filling in whole scenes mimicking the author’s voice or, more often, cutting huge swathes of text and reordering it. (I have cut so many first chapters you do not even know. And don’t even ask me about how many action scenes I’ve written.) It takes a whole slew of skills to do higher level editing.
I get it, money is tight. But it’s tight for everyone–including your editors. For me, I’ve been editing professionally for 25 years. I am disabled and editing is my primary source of income. I deserve to be paid a living wage for my work and expertise. While I charge on the lower end of editing because I know most of my clientele is as cash-strapped as I am, I still need to be able to pay bills.
Grammarly, ProWriting Aid, Google Docs, Word, Etc. can help but they aren’t a substitute for a professional editor. They will not be able to tell you that your character is an antisemitic stereotype or that you dropped a plot thread or that your plot is the exact same as the previous book or that your sex scene has two too many limbs (extra hands and tongues are a problem) or that your heroine’s eye color changed from blue to brown halfway through. These are all things I’ve caught just this month.
Beta readers are a good start, but again they aren’t professionals. They aren’t trained to look for this. And as someone who is trying to train other editors, it is not easy. Editing requires the ability to think laterally as well as linearly. It is both detail-oriented and macro-oriented.
So to answer the initial question is 3,000 for 100,000 words unreasonable. No. Not at all. Especially if you’re getting a content edit or a line edit.
^_^
I see you mentioning the different types of editing but what exactly are the differences?
So here are the different types of editing. And I’m going to use an analogy of cooking to do this.
Under the Developmental Editing Umbrella are the following:
Book/Story Doctoring - This is your recipe creation. A book doctor helps you with creating a viable (but not perfected) recipe. It includes things like world building, character creation, story arcs, character arcs, outlining, and making sure the story is in the right order and has all of the appropriate beats. A book doctor will often help write scenes wholesale and they will do a lot of handholding through the process. It’s intensive. And it’s expensive.
Content Editing - This is your fine tuning of the recipe. A content editor will read what should be your second or third draft and help you with pacing, flow, consistent characterization, filling plot holes, and fleshing out action or sex scenes. A content editor will often do some chapter rearranging or suggest you cut scenes/chapters/characters wholesale. It’s not as intensive as a book doctor and it’s about making sure that you have a viable story plot, character and pacing wise. This is not checking spelling or grammar. And it’s not just pointing out problems but also providing solutions for said problems, even if it means rewriting something for the author.
Line editing - This is your plating/presentation. It’s making the language shine and sparkle. This is about the writing–the language–itself. I did a meta on this a few years ago that goes into exactly what a line edit looks like. It’s not rewriting, and a line editor will not fully flesh out your scenes if you’re an under-writer or fully cut extraneous description if you’re an over-writer. They may do some depending on the editor. But mostly they stick with the text they are given.
Sensitivity Editing - This is your making sure your recipe can accommodate people with allergies. Sensitivity editing is more than just looking for things that are racist, sexist, or homophobic. It includes things like consent, populating the world, character description, phraseology, and even global things like plot points/villains/etc. Ideally the sensitivity editor will be from the marginalized community represented, but it isn’t always feasible. Some sensitivity editors can do a general edit, but it requires training and experience. But no one person is a monolith. Keep this in mind. Sensitivity editing can be draining because the editors have to open themselves up to the potential pain to be effective. They are deliberately putting themselves into a traumatic situation to make your story better.
Hi there! It really depends on the kind of editing, how experienced (and busy) the editor is, the shape the manuscript is in, and a number of other factors. I’ve seen anything from .005/word for proofreading to .08/word for developmental editing. My own rates start at .015/word for an editorial review and go up to .03/word for a heavy developmental edit (consult + lengthy critique + margin comments + follow up call + email support).
A lot of people experience sticker shock with editing, so you’re not alone there. You can find people to do it for cheap, but it’s usually a you-get-what-you-pay-for kind of thing. (At the same time, I always encourage writers to ask editors for a sample of their work before hiring them–don’t assume that because the editor charges a lot you’ll click with their style.)
I might be preaching to the choir here, but I’ve gotten enough asks about editing prices that I think it’s worth pointing out a few things:
Editing takes time. You can’t just quickly breeze through a manuscript once and come back with helpful, detailed recommendations. In my case, no matter what kind of editing I do, I carefully read every manuscript twice. Because of the level of focus and attention I give to the story, for a 100,000 word manuscript that could mean almost 20 hours of my time just to read the thing… before I even start writing a critique.
Good editors are experienced and often highly educated. If you can find an editor who is willing to work for minimum wage, more power to you (I guess?). Personally, I’m a published fiction writer, and I have a masters degree and years of experience in my field, so I charge accordingly. Most editors I respect (read: that I would hire myself) have rates starting at $80/hr.
If you want useful feedback, there’s no such thing as “taking a quick look” at your manuscript. I get a lot of inquiries from writers who hope I can come down on my price if they don’t need as much feedback: “Just take a quick look” or “give me an overall impression.” There are two problems with this. The first (see above) is that even reading the manuscript can take hours of my time. The second is that the only way for me to give “quick” feedback is to give shallow, crappy feedback… which I just can’t bring myself to do.
The bummer, of course, is that all of these factors put editing way outside of a lot of writers’ price range. Every time I get an inquiry from a broke writer and have to turn them down, my heart dies a little. That’s part of the reason I’m working on my self-editing guide The Complete Guide to Self Editing for Fiction Writers. It’s a DIY guide that walks you through doing a story-level, scene-level, and sentence-level edit on your story. Completing it has been slower going than I originally thought (It just keeps getting longer!!), but I hope to have it finished soon.
Thanks for writing! I hope this has been helpful, and good luck to you!
So for instance, my Marginalized identities include: Disabled, Chronically ill, body positivity, bisexual, genderqueer (I prefer just queer), Pagan (Eclectic Wicca), Domestic Abuse Survivor, Rape Survivor, Sexual Assault Survivor, and AFAB. So using my own marginalizations I can check a lot of boxes. My specialty is consent. Particularly sexual consent. I am VERY good at it because of my history. However because of my personal relationships, education, background, and various training I can provide a decently competent generalized sensitivity edit… like I’ll catch antisemitism even though I am not Jewish because my best friend and co-author is Jewish (I’ve even caught things that she missed because she’s gotten used to the microaggressions and I haven’t). I also know when to back out and go – “this is outside of my expertise; you need someone else.”
Manuscript Assessment - Basically this is your food critic. It’s a professional opinion about what is good about your story, what is not so good, what kinds of editing you need, and what you should be focusing on next. It’s often done in very general terms and does not provide solutions. You are essentially paying someone for their professional opinion about where your story stands at that moment.
These fall under the Technical Editing umbrella:
Copy Editing - This is your cleaning up the plate. You know that person with a rag who removes the little bit of schmutz or stray herb? That’s the copy editor. They clean up the story – fixing spelling, grammar, punctuation, consistency (did the character change eye or hair color?), pregnancy length, consistent timing, etc.
Proofreading - This is the person who makes sure the final presentation is pretty. It’s the waiter who sets the plate down in front of you and arranges it just so. It’s checking to make sure that every line has the right open and close quotes, for instance. That you haven’t missed a period someplace. That there isn’t a random extra space somewhere. It’s the final presentation.
——-
Those are the differences. Some editors do more than one thing when they edit, I know I do a very basic sensitivity edit with anything greater than a line edit because it goes hand in hand with cleaning up language. But basically it boils down to the amount of work, time, problem solving, and hand-holding the editor has to do.
Copy editing is the Technical Editor’s bread and butter. And most developmental editors can also act as copy editors… but not at the same time.
Line editing is the Developmental Editor’s bread and butter. It requires some problem solving, lateral thinking, and hand holding. (Mostly about repetitive sentence structure.) But it isn’t as in depth as a content editor or as intensive as a book doctor.
Had to share this here because you’re right and you should say it. It’s incredible how many people came out of the woodwork as soon as AO3 was down and suddenly had no compunctions at all about screaming how much they love and need fanfic–on the AO3 twitter. Is it so much harder to do in the comment section?
At this point I don’t care anymore if people call me entitled or think I’m out of line. If fanfic is so meaningful to you that you cannot go half an hour without, let alone 24h, then you can get over yourself long enough to write a fucking comment. No excuses.
“writing comments is hard and scary” yeah well GUESS WHAT so is writing fanfics. fandom as a community is dying, because it is instead treated as a COMMODITY, a CONSUMER PRODUCT. We’re not asking for much. We’re asking for a CONNECTION. We don’t want to sell, we want to share.
You’ve shown your hand. You’ve admitted you cannot live without us. Now ACT LIKE IT. Go write a fucking comment.
I was absolutely at a loss without AO3. I have been trying to comment more anyway because it’s such an easy way for me to say thanks to the people who put their stuff out there, for free, daily. I read for at least 2 hours a day, probably even more at weekends or when I’m gripped by a new enthralling fic. The bare minimum I can do is take 2 minutes to comment. After that first kudos I try to respond to a new chapter with a comment so the writer knows that someone is paying attention, that there is an ongoing interest in their efforts. Fandom needs community. Community needs communication. Say thanks. Say it made you laugh or smile, or it distracted you from grim reality for a while.
I love this, because there’s obviously something very clever going on to analyse patterns of language, but it’s also profoundly ignorant.
[ID: A screenshot of a Grammarly correction, labelled “clarity: conciseness”. The original text reads “Every book, which wasn’t many…” This is crossed out with the suggestion “Everyn’t many book” and the note “Consider shortening this phrase.” /end id]
Story time: this reminds me of some kids in an English class I’m in. They were doing written work and the teacher and I were going around checking their work. They had to do like, “do/do not”, and one example was “prepare”. Something like “My father does not/doesn’t prepare dinner”. I look at this one kid’s paper and this galaxy-brained child had written “My father preparen’t dinner” and it took everything in me to not lose it laughing right there like. This child saw a pattern and ran with it and I respect that.
Intermittentlysmitten hid this in the tags and shouldn’t have.
“Q: Why aren’t the studios budging? A: They seem to believe they’ve done enough already. The AMPTP’s statement about the SAG-AFTRA strike on Thursday claims the organization offered “historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, and a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.” (That “groundbreaking” AI proposal would be the aforementioned suggestion that background actors sell off their likenesses forever.) And as Disney CEO Bob Iger recently put it in an interview that immediately got him scorched on Twitter, Hollywood “is and has been a great business for all of these people, and it will continue to be, even through disruptive times. But being realistic is imperative here.” Q: How much does that guy make again? A: I’m so glad you asked! He just signed a contract extension that brings his annual take-home to $31 million, assuming he gets all his bonuses.
I’m sorry, what? To be honest, his salary is kind of embarrassingly low compared to some of the other guys. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav made $498,915,318 in the past five years, according to the Los Angeles Times; poor Iger only got to $195,092,460. Ted Sarandos, meanwhile, reportedly took home $192,171,581 from Netflix in the past half-decade, and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts got $170,158,088.”
A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code
spring2020
for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/
I don’t know a lot about sewing, but I want to make or have my mom make some linen pants & shirts for when I’m watering, because it gets to 105 here and we have mosquitos so I need to be covered. What type of linen do I buy? Also, linen pajama shorts, yes/no?
(I’ve been wearing my renfaire pants which are a linen mix, I think. But the frikking mosquitos that hide in the tomatoes get my arms)
If anyone is curious what she says directly after this quote:
When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things.
The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.
Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop.
The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them.
There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.
This process in turn helps us to identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion when making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.
Apparently Serbia, and especially Belgrade, has a huge problem with air pollution.
Ms. Francine Pickup, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Serbia, explained that: “It is estimated that cities are the source of as much as 75% of total CO2 emissions in the world, of which the largest percentage comes from traffic and cooling and heating in buildings”. She later continued to explain that 59% of the Serbian population lives in urban areas and that the number is constantly increasing. Because the population density is so high, creating green areas and planting trees – which represent natural air purification in urban areas– is a complex goal to achieve, as there is a lack of free areas for landscaping.
The microalgae replace two 10-year-old trees or 200 square meters of lawn. The function of the LIQUID 3 is practically an imitation of it. Both trees and grass perform photosynthesis and bind carbon dioxide. However, the advantage of microalgae is that it is 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees. The team behind LIQUID 3 has stated that their goal is not to replace forests or tree planting plans but to use this system to fill those urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees. In conditions of intense pollution, such as Belgrade, many trees cannot survive, while algae do not have a problem with the great levels of pollution.
The project is designed to be multifunctional. LIQUID3 is also a bench, it has chargers for mobile phones, as well as a solar panel, thanks to which the bench has lighting during the night.
Dr. Ivan Spasojevic also explained that “the Institute used single-celled freshwater algae, which exist in ponds and lakes in Serbia and can grow in tap water, and are resistant to high and low temperatures. The system does not require special maintenance – it is enough to remove the biomass created by dividing algae, which can be used as an excellent fertilizer, in a month and a half, pour new water and minerals, and the algae continue to grow indefinitely. This project aims to popularize and expand the use of microalgae in Serbia, because they can be used in wastewater treatment, as compost for green areas, for the production of biomass and biofuels, as well as for air purification from exhaust gases from the factories”.
This sounds like it is an incredible innovation for clean air and helping the environment, especially in big cities. And as we’ve seen in the news lately, Air Quality needs all the help it can get!
Therefore… I vote that we GLAMORIZE and ROMANTICIZE these things!
#Aesthetic photos.
Seeing if they can be a DIY Green-Screen, for those who want that kind of thing.
Waxing poetic about the beauty of the green-glass structures.
Stories and/or Art about Pond Fairies taking the opportunity to be Living It Up in the Big City!
Talking about how this vibrant green “Pop of Color” really livens up the concrete-grey cityscape!
Give these things some POSITIVE PR!
.
Because a lot of how we conceptualize beauty is cultural. And there’s likely to be a certain knee-jerk reaction to the idea of “"replacing our beautiful trees with weird, gross tanks if pond-scum.”
So let’s find and praise the beauty of these things. So that people will know that we *want* them, as well as seeing the need.
You wanted solarpunk, this is how we do solarpunk!
A few people seemed appreciative of my post about how to use AO3’s Marked for Later feature, so I thought I’d follow up with another tip about comments versus bookmarks.
As part of the amazing @justleaveacommentfest I noticed a few people mentioned leaving nice comments in bookmarks, and I thought it might help to have a little info about how comments are different from bookmarks, and why it’s better to send a comment if you want to make an author happy or make fandom friends or have an interesting discussion.
Bookmarks *are* viewable by everyone, unless you make them private. If you plan to say anything negative in your bookmark, please make it private. It’s not really the flip side, however, that leaving positive statements in your bookmarks will reach the author, though.
Most authors are alerted when they get new comments, either through their dashboard or via email if they choose, or both. Yay! Serotonin boost, and also the ability to reply back and start a conversation! Plus, readers can have great discussions with each *other* in the comments section of a fic! If you’re super into a fic you can read comments on the chapter even years later, and sometimes find the author adding additional thoughts or discussing their thought process while writing! It’s like DVD extras for fanfic! (Do kids these days know what DVD extras are any more? Damned if I know).
You don’t really know, as an author, when someone bookmarks one of your fics. Some authors, particularly when they are feeling low (cough cough) may also look at bookmarks to see if there are nice things there. This would basically just involve clicking on the bookmarks for each of your fics individually to see if there’s anything a.) new and b.) nice in them.
This is an act of desperation. It’s not really a wise thing to do, as 99% of bookmarks have no comments, or just list the title and author in fear of the fic being deleted some day and not knowing what you’re missing. Even worse, if you, as an author, get desperate enough to cruise your bookmarks, you are as likely to see someone say something like “Meh” or “This got boring so I stopped reading at Chapter 5” or “Too many werewolves 3/10” in a werewolf fic than you are to see a nice compliment.
So, if you loved a fic and want to memorialize your love in a bookmark, be an extra super-duper sweetheart and cut and paste that into a comment for the author! Make the AO3 environment enriching for both authors and fellow readers in the comments section, and protect your friendly local author by not providing intermittent positive reinforcement for the negative behavior of scrolling through bookmarks!
I still recommend bookmarking fics. Bookmark those favorite fics you want to come back and read later, or use bookmarks to leave yourself little reminders if they are nice or in private bookmarks if they are not nice. Bookmark good resources, like how to code things in html or how to use AO3 filters most effectively. Find awesome new things to read by looking through the bookmarks of your favorite authors, because if you vibe with someone’s writing you may also vibe with their favorite fics to read!
every time this post comes around, my favorite part is the “I know it’s the Mets” qualifier at the beginning lmao like how baseball that this zillion note posts starts with “sorry for putting this hellteam on your dash, bUT”
Y’all have no idea how hard I was trying not to laugh in class at that poor bird
They…they just blew up a fucking bird…
Ball’s dead. Bird’s dead. I’m dead
World Heritage Post
personally my favorite thing about Mr. Bird Evaporator is this
imagine being the poor fool tryna rob this man’s house only to be instantly transported to the same dimension as that bird
So I was scrolling and saw this image in an article about the European heat wave,
And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that’s a lot of red.
And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don’t know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it’s normal there?
“The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.
“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”
”The Sahel, for instance, has been heating at a faster pace than the global average despite being hot already. Burkina Faso and Mali, both in West Africa’s Sahel, are among countries that are set to become almost uninhabitable by 2080, if the world continues on its current trajectory, a UK university study found. Its people are especially vulnerable due to shrinking resources, such as water, and poor amenities, and a dearth of trees and parks means there are few options for places to cool off.“
Intermittent fanfic writer & dabbler in language and translation. I ramble about life, sci-fi & fantasy, comics, anime & manga, art, writing, and other assorted interests.
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