The price editors charge nowadays for editing services varies widely. You’ll hear quotes tossed around on discussion forums and other venues like, “I was charged five cents per word” or “I paid three cents per word” or “my editor charged me by the hour, averaging $75 for every five pages, which normally took her about an hour.”

 

I sometimes refer clients to a website set up by a Canadian editor that offers an online form. You can enter the number of words for your book (or other project) and then fill in blanks for the cost per word or the cost per hour. I always caution my clients not to panic, because I don’t charge the highest rates one might find there, and there are other considerations. Those considerations take into account the kind of work being discussed, which generally breaks down into the following categories:

 

1. Proofreading.

2. Copy editing.

3. Structural editing.

 

I listed these from least to most expensive. If I’m hired for proofreading, I’m looking for spelling mistakes, typos, and minor but important matters like subject/verb agreement. Even though the last item technically falls in the copy editing category, I don’t think I could bring myself to ignore a clause such as “…she fed the three horses its carrots.” I’d simply have to rewrite it to read “…she fed the three horses their carrots.”

 

Copy editing represents quite a bit of my current work. It’s about more than correcting grammatical errors (although that’s included, too). My clients hire me to add value in the sense of improving their writing style. I love working with clients who are gifted writers, improving on written material that’s already good! But often I rewrite material that’s simply sub par. This represents more work for me, and sometimes headaches.

 

Structural editing includes such things as commentary on the story arc of a book, the pace at which a narrative unfolds, the stages of a plot, and so on. It’s the high level stuff. I charge more for that sort of work, because it’s added value; you’re paying me for my judgement and my extensive education in English literature. Costs can still be reasonable because I don’t need to spend endless hours working on the manuscript sentence by sentence, word by word.

 

I don’t publish a price list on my website because the variables are so many. For small one-off jobs I lean more toward off-the shelf pricing. But for projects like books, I prefer to read sample chapters and plot or chapter summaries, and work out an “all in” price that includes structural editing, copy editing, and proofreading (assuming all of that is necessary). Sometimes an author commits to multiple books and I give them an “all in” price for each book, discounted as part of the larger package.

 

There are many ads on social media these days for book publishing “packages” where a branded publisher offers to take your book from rough draft to published product for a few thousand dollars or even a few hundred dollars. I’m sure some of these are genuine but most seem suspicious to me. The cheaper deals must make use of AI, which comes with a host of problems. (I’ll address that in another blog post.) Some are part of what we call in the trade “vanity publishing” where a company researches and writes a book for you, usually after recording a few phone interviews with yourself and perhaps a few of your friends, and then generates a “quickie” book. An acquaintance of mine paid over US$20,000 for a business-oriented autobiography. I was one of the people the editors called and interviewed over the phone, for content. When I received my gift copy, I was appalled at the low quality of the writing. I literally couldn’t read more than a few pages without cri. Of course, I started with the chapter in which I was quoted at length. Judging by how much they got wrong just in reporting my words, I’d say the whole project was a disaster, so be careful!

 

I’m a big advocate of crowdfunding for book projects. I used an interesting website called Publishizer to launch an Indie GoGo type of crowdfunding for my book The Year of Drinking Magic: Twelve Ceremonies with the Vine of Souls. The book was an account of my esoteric experiences during and after a trip I took to the Peruvian Amazon in late 2013 in which I drank the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca. The book went on to win the Silver Medal in its category in 2018 at the coveted Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPBA). I raised more than $7,000 for my book, partly because I invited my friends to pre-order signed copies, but also because I organized some sweet discounted travel prizes for people making higher donations. (Essentially, a friend of mine who owns a retreat center offered discount stays to campaign contributors. It was a “win-win” for everyone involved. (Note that you can still view my campaign on the Publishizer website by searching there under my name or the book titles or clicking this link: https://publishizer.com/the-year-of-drinking-magic/ I’ll write a whole blog entry just about that subject. And yes, I help writers with their fundraising campaigns.)

 

The point is, unless you get very lucky and find an influential book agent or land one of the “big three” publishers, you’re likely to need to invest several thousand dollars to prepare your book for publication, and then for the guerrilla marketing that follows. Even if you get a major publisher, they’ll expect you to promote the book. You’ll incur expenses doing that yourself, or in hiring a publicist. I recommend to clients that they anticipate spending at least $4,000 to $5,000 to get their manuscript ready for publication, and a similar amount if they publish the book themselves or use a “service publisher” to get the book typeset and listed on Amazon. These costs can vary wildly depending on the nature of your project. A collection of fiction short stories is a very different proposition from, say, a high-end hardcover cookbook with special layouts and professional photos of each dish.

 

Again, I’ll cover many of the details in other online articles, and you can email me with questions, too. You will spend more if you hire talented graphic designers and list your book in multiple places. You can also reduce your costs considerably if you have a graphic designer friend who can typeset and produce graphics for less, or if you have these skills yourself. I recommend to my authors that they create a website for each book or other major projects like screenplays. That’s a subject for another day, but your project will be taken very seriously by publishers and film producers if you establish a decent website for your project. If you have the skills to design your own website using some of the cost-efficient services out there (Graphy is a good example) you can publish a website for a few hundred dollars, but I’d budget at least $1,000 for website creation, plus the monthly cost of web hosting. Again, crowdfunding can offset most of these costs.

 

In my experience, writers generally underestimate the cost of bringing a book from idea to published product. I’m skeptical of the quality of AI-generated writing and editing at this point; the systems cannot match the quality and human touch I bring to my clients. Will that ever change? Quite possibly, but I think I’ll fare okay for at least a few more years.

 

I’ve only touched lightly on some big topics here. I’ll write more soon. My goal is to have this blog space represent a repository of editing and publishing wisdom. I will also record some interviews and other materials for the YouTube channel and social media like Twitter/X for The Writing Sage. Check back from time to time!