Hiring an editor can feel like a very big step, especially if it is your first time doing so. Not only is it a financial decision, but it’s an emotional one, too. You are handing over your precious word-baby to someone who will, by definition, tell you what needs to be fixed about it. In many ways, this can feel like giving away control of your project. It’s scary, and it’s difficult, but it can also be so, so worth it.
Why Hire an Editor?
Before we get into the details of what to look for in an editor, it’s important to address the question of why you even need an editor. After all, you know how to write. You understand grammar. Why spend all of that money to have some unknown denizen of Grammar Land poke and prod at your project?
There are a few key reasons. For one, we’re never good at finding fault in our own children. After hundreds of hours of staring at the same words, of obsessing over the futures of our beloved characters or restructuring our carefully crafted arguments, we are simply too close to our projects to see them clearly. It all blends together. Our eyes glance over the dangling modifiers and misplaced commas because we have looked at them a hundred times.
An editor is a pair of fresh, trained eyes. They don’t have the same history with the project that you do, and that allows them to see things you can’t see. They also don’t have the same emotional attachment, which can provide them with far clearer sight. It’s the same as telling your therapist about your partner only to have them point out a collection of glaringly red flags you couldn’t see through a haze of starry eyed love.
Hiring an editor is not an admission that you aren’t a good writer. After all, even the best of writers have editors. I would be willing to bet that every single writer on the best-sellers list has at least one editor, potentially more, helping them to polish their book until it shines. Hiring an editor, rather than being an admission that your writing isn’t up to snuff, is actually a vote of confidence in your work. It’s an investment in it. It’s a decision to put your best foot forward so that when you hit those query trenches, your work is as spotless as possible.
Levels of Editing
So, you’ve made the decision to hire an editor. But… now what? The first step of the process is to figure out what level of editing your work requires. There are three main levels, and I will list them here from the most in-depth to the least.
Developmental or substantive edits: This level of editing is for projects that are at earlier stages in the writing process. Developmental editors work not only with grammar and sentence structure but with things such as plot, character development, and theme. They’re the people who tell you that chapters 4 and 5 need to be reordered, or that your favourite sidekick character serves no purpose to the plot. They usually neglect things such as comma placement in favour of the bigger fixes.
Copy editing: Copy editing is more about the mechanical and grammatical details of writing than about plot or character arc. Copy editors go through writing word by word and letter by letter, checking that pronouns have antecedents and the dependent clauses are connected to independent clauses. They also look at such things as consistency, fact-checking, and basic formatting, checking that footnotes are in the right order and the table of contents lines up.
Proofreading: Proofreading is an even lighter version of copy editing, and is done as the very last step in the publishing process. Typically, a proofreader will look through fully formatted and typeset proofs, scanning for typos and other small issues not caught by the copy editors before them.
What to Look for in An Editor
Once you’ve figured out what level of editing your work requires, it is time to find an editor. This moment is when you decide what exactly you are looking for in terms of work style, priorities, and communication levels. Editors all have their own unique styles and ways in which they prefer to communicate.
For instance, do you prefer regular updates and long phone calls, or would you prefer an editor to just get on with it and send you all of the changes at once upon completion? What is your timeframe for completion? Do you have any deadlines coming up, and if so, can your chosen editor meet them? Do you want your edits to be done on hardcopy or on a computer? Do you want to sit down with your editor in person and discuss your work, or would you prefer a strictly online, email-based relationship?
All of these things are things that need to be considered, but more importantly, you need to be able to trust your editor implicitly. This trust has to be in more than just an editor’s capabilities, but also in their communication style and their intentions. A good editor isn’t just good at editing—they are also good at communicating their edits in a way that won’t make a writer question everything they have ever written. And, perhaps even more importantly, a good editor has to be motivated by a desire to help make their writer’s own voice shine, not to replace the writer’s voice with their own. A good editor has to be someone who can set their own ego aside to honour a writer’s voice and style above their own. You need to feel like your editor is going to champion your work over their own particular stylistic ego.
Budget and Costs
Editing isn’t usually cheap, and there’s a reason for this. On top of the years of training and experience a good editor will have is the time-consuming nature of editing. Most editors will do at least two passes of your writing, along with an initial read-through. Some will do three passes. Each pass takes time, as the editor meticulously combs through the text word by word.
There are several different ways to price editing, however. Some editors charge by the word or the page, while others charge by the hour. There are benefits and disadvantages to these methods. By-the-word or by-the-page editing prices are set in stone—you will know exactly how much your project will cost before the editor starts, and that amount isn’t going to change unless you agree in writing to add or subtract words to the text at a later date. By-the-hour editing is far less certain, although good editors will be able to give you an accurate estimate of the time it is going to take. If your editor is very fast, your prices might be lower; sometimes, however, fast editing can come at the price of thoroughness.
Rates can vary hugely between editors. Copy editing is generally priced between $0.02 a word ($20 per 1,000 words) and $0.04 a word ($40 per 1,000 words). Developmental editing has an even wider price range, from $0.04 a word to $0.12 per word. Developmental editing also has a wider range of thoroughness, however, and different rates may come with different levels of editing depth. A cheaper rate may mean less thorough feedback.
When it comes to hourly rates, the range runs from $30/hour to $60/hour for copy editing, and for developmental edits from $40/hour to $70/hour, with advanced editors some times charging as much as $100/hour. When it comes to editing, there is something to fit a hundred different budgets.
Conclusion
With any luck, this post has given you the information you need to set off on your own editing journey. Let me know if I left anything out that you think is important to discuss. The world of editing is wide, especially when there are so many genres of writing involved. But I truly believe a good editor can give a piece of writing the last thing it needs to go out into the world and dazzle its readers.
Editing by Thistle 