It’s a tough world. Suppose you self-publish a novel. You do it right, or so you think: hire an editor, pay for respectable cover art, and so on. Comes to about $3K including a final proofing, any special formatting you have to hire out, etc. Unlike most fairly shortsighted first-time self-publishers, you’re thinking the long game; you have the good sense to price your work appealingly to build a base. Your profit on your novel is $6 per print copy and $3 per e-copy. Let’s consider those equivalent in terms of your profit, so $3 per copy.

One thousand book sales later, you’ve covered your basic costs and may officially begin Turning A Profit. Hallelujah. Other people, who had less pride and principle, had someone off Ninerr or wherever “put an edit on it” for $300, used amateurish cover art done by their aunt (or an AI) for nothing, and figured why pay for proofreading if someone has “put an edit on it”? They started turning a profit on their half-assery much more quickly. There you sat wondering how to sell a thousand copies while the half-assery got lapped up by a public with decreasing standards and literacy.

In essence, you’re the boutique grocery store that lost out to MansonianPriceSlasher MegaCheepcheapcheep Grocery. Your work and products are beautiful, inviting, well cared for, free of the Honey Boo Boo crowd, and making less money. Only a limited percentage of the reading audience was your realistic target market. The rest could not read well enough to see your added value. Declining taste and literacy suck–just watch TV to see what dominates.

This is the scenario that might obtain for perhaps the majority of my clients. I can’t control most of that. The naughty m-word is the main factor, and the Venn diagram overlapping ‘people who love to market’ and ‘people who love to write’ has a rather small intersection. I can tell people they have to do their own marketing until I’m hoarse, and their lips will still say “yes, yes” but their eyes will still say “FOAD, FOAD, FOAD.” What I might be able to influence is how they employ an editor. The best way I can devise to do that is to give them some free advice on how to hire editors. Most people hire us before gaining the slightest real understanding of our roles.

That’s a good percentage of the publication cost promised to someone without knowing what they really do. If I pay a mechanic $1800, for example, I want to get the desired result. I don’t want to find out later that the mechanic is charging me that sum to give me a result that I maybe needed but did not seek. (“Yeah, we came in below your budget so we tacked on some body work in addition to your brakes.”) What if I expected the mechanic to throw in detailing? That’s about what it’s like when one expects the editor to proofread after editing.

Okay, so it’s difficult. Fine. What to do is to educate yourself about who does this, what they do, and what their insecurities are. And those are legion.

• Sneak onto some editors’ forums. Yes. Pretend to be one. Don’t say anything; just read. See how they talk and act among themselves. Notice that a not inconsequential percentage are more than a bit neurotic. Freelance editing is great for shut-ins, and the modern world enables them to refuse vocal and visual contact. And while it might seem like I’m scoffing, I get that some people have serious traumas, disabilities physical and psychological, and deal with issues the world doesn’t comprehend. I can’t know. What you can know is how their conversations go with their colleagues. You’ll learn the repellent term “edi-buddies,” see many people pleading for help with where to put a comma under Chicago (or whatever style guide they’ve been told to treat as Scripture), and so on. You will be less awed by us when you see that the bar’s fairly low. I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this, but I’m the Editorial Maverick, and mavericks gotta mav now and then.
• Read up on editing modes. Editing modes are how sophisticated editors guide their working focuses. There is valid question how many modes should be on this list, and I saw some with more options. Run a search on “editing modes,” ignore all the references to Word and forms of editing that have nothing to do with book editing. Mine had to go four pages deep. (I have a list on my site, but I wanted to suggest an external perspective. That’s a fancy way of saying I thought it was a bad look to use my own list to support my definitions. Don’t just take my word for them.) A capable editor will examine your work, and ideally your goals and wishes, and suggest an editing mode that will guide that work. Maybe if you have some idea in advance of what mode would best help you–which can’t occur if you have never heard of them–you will get a better outcome.
• Think about your goals. Serious question to answer honestly: Do you not really care about the quality but want to be able to say it was edited? There are plentiful starving humanities BAs who are working 2.5 jobs and have decided that they r editors, and many of them will do it for low three figures. If cost is the main concern and you plan to be labor-intensive, think in terms of a flat fee so that you can really milk them. That’s why some of us no longer do flat-fee work at all–because people used us too much, to the point of abuse. So the logical people to do this are the ones who will actually go along with it, and who have not yet learned that lesson. There are always some. I think every freelance editor ends up way undercharging early in the process. Find one who hasn’t learned. Be their lesson.
• Decide whether you are comfortable with (or can at least take) constructive feedback. Do you really even want that, or have you been on too many writers’ forums where you learned that it was a virtue to “fight for my words”? In other words, do you want to argue, or do you want to learn and improve your book? When most people want to bicker, they pay zero. They go on BegsDoor or ZuckBook and find them for free, virtually anonymous, no need to hold back, both barrels, any subject. I knew one prospective (and basically gifted) writer, long before I started doing this, who was mainly looking forward to arguing with an editor. I’m not surprised he has never yet actually published. But there’s no need to hire a sparring partner. Anyone good enough to whip you in the debate probably won’t bother. We’ll just say something that ought to chill your soul: “Okay. If you’re going to ignore much of my guidance, no problem. It’s your book. I’ll simply exercise my option not to be credited.” That’s an Alan Smithee, and it means the editor thinks you refuse to accept salvage of this train wreck. If it doesn’t chill your soul, you shouldn’t even have bothered hiring any editor at all.
• Get a referral. This is where writers’ groups can have benefits (not a thing I say that often). Ask someone who has used one; see if they’ll tell you what it cost and what editing mode was in use. If they don’t know what you mean by the latter, they might not have gotten the education they should have. What you hope to hear is something like “a substantive edit.” This leads into…
• Find out what the real thing costs/requires. Some editors charge by the hour, some by the word, some quote flat fees. The longer your work, the more editing costs, but not proportionately. There is no economy of scale; there is extravagance of scale. The general view is that 70,000 words is novel length. (Always words. Never pages. Telling them how many pages it is announces “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”) All right, so your novel is a Michenerian epic of just over 200,000 words. If people said a given amount was reasonable for 70K, does that mean triple that is reasonable for 210K? No. The reason is that there is so much more information to hold in the brain: keeping names, stories, side stories, plotlines, and images in mind. You should at least know what a seasoned professional costs before you go with cheep cheap cheep.
• Aunt Nelly or her equivalent? Most people have some relative who thinks she can edit. In some cases perhaps she can; in the majority, her only qualification is that she reads a lot. (Based on what I am seeing from novice editors coming up, that might make her competitive with some.) Here there can be issues, because whether or not Aunt Nelly is competent (unlikely), she will be very hurt if she is refused. If she is not, you probably will get what you pay for. Hopefully she doesn’t promise to “put an edit on it.” But if you are realistic, you must at least consider this possibility and either pursue it (abandon all hope in most cases) or rule it out for compelling reason (as in you’ve seen from Aunt Nelly’s notes to people that she cannot refrain from writing things like “Your a great neice.” A cynical and arguably deceitful way, if Aunt Nelly all but insists, is to let her “edit” it but don’t use that copy. Some would say that’s absolutely awful. What’s worse? Letting an unqualified, well-meaning and well-loved relative ruin your ms? Hurting a well-loved relative’s feelings when she meant nothing but kindness? Maybe I’m influenced a bit by life near cultures in which kindness and face-saving count for much more than blunt force truthiness.

The question you should probably be considering in the background would be: What’s the point of a cheap cheep cheap editing job? Is it even worth $300? What do I get for that? Even a proofreading job at that price point is probably going to be terrible for a novel-length ms. It happened to a client of mine. Here’s the tale:

I have known this current client since college. His name is Mike Cook, and he wrote quite a good book. (I feel comfortable talking about the kitchen where we made the sausage because I always write a post about that when a book goes gold, but only if the client is okay with it. Mike was. Cat’s already out of that bag.) Our lives diverged since the mid-80s but touched base again via a mutual friend from back in the day, who is also a client. Now, Mike’s genre was medieval fantasy and he had some enormous strengths. He didn’t want cheap cheep cheap; he wanted to perfect his craft and produce a quality book he could be proud of.

One amazing aspect was his medievalist vocabulary, which sent me to the dictionary a dozen times. I’m not used to running to the dictionary more than once or twice per job, and usually it’s words like “irony” or “to comprise” that I have to keep reminding myself don’t mean what most people mean by them. Impressed as hell.

So one by one, I looked up his terms, one of which was “gong farmer.” I looked it up; it also came as “gong fermor,” and it meant the people who used to shovel out the latrine pits at night. Not a glamor job, I reckon. All right. I’d told Mike that while I was the best proofreader going, I never took money to proof anything I’d seen before because only when seeing it for the first time can I do the job to my personal standards. I recommended he hire one, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. I don’t know a bunch of other proofreaders. He ended up going to Eighterr or someplace and hiring an idiot for the $300 range, if I recall.

Such a miscarriage of editorial justice. She looked up none of his words. It was obvious that she simply ran spell and grammar checkers, accepted everything, congrats 2 me i prufed. The most obvious fail was that “gong farmer” had been globally changed to what spellcheck suggested: “young farmer.” In essence, she took money to use the primitive AI proofreading built into a word processor.

If it were up to me that would probably have serious consequences.

Mike came to me with the result. I was appalled; I was also partly responsible, because he’d done everything I suggested and trusted my guidance. I felt like crap. There was only one thing to do, which was proof it myself. It would not be to my normal standards because that was no longer possible given that I’d edited it with a couple passes. It would still be far better than Elevener or Twelver’s lower tier. I couldn’t charge him, and I didn’t. I wanted him to have justice, not to pay me more money.

Anyway, there’s one of the banana peels. Some people will “put an edit on” a manuscript of any length for any amount of money. The question is: Is a $300 edit worth $300? If you rejoin that well, at least I’d get proofreading, which I do need, the question is whether the proofreading will be worth $300. I’m telling you I’ve seen where it wasn’t worth $3. Or where people should be fined for it.

If you are at least realistic about the question of cheap cheep cheap editing and proofreading, that’s the main objective of this piece. The question that’s most germane would be, assuming my kind are absolutely off the table and outside your price point: Should I just go without, pay $300 for crappy work, or accept Aunt Nelly’s offer to proof it for free ‘because she reads a lot’?

I see why people go with Aunt Nelly. And if people want to look around for free or inexpensive options, here you go. This is where you might find them, and how to empower your plans so that you make the best decision for your ms. Obviously, I won’t compete with either Aunt Nelly or someone going bargain basement flat fee, so I might as well help people process those options if that’s the only way I can be of service.

If I were you, I’d be wondering why I have put all this effort into telling people about the alternatives to hiring me. It’s because they are going to (or should) come up anyway, and one of two things will happen. Either people will say great, I’ll go with Sixerr, thanks, and their outcome will hopefully be better than some because they educated themselves. Or people will say great, this tells me what the cheapo alternatives are. Now I know what I’m missing and why I’m missing it. At peace.

I’ll take that.