The Cost Of Editing

As someone who spends a lot of time in author spaces, I know how complex it is to decide to spend money on your book. However...

If you’re reading this blog, I presume you know at least two things about me, but if you are new here, I’ll inform you: I am both an indie author and a professional editor of over sixteen years. I do both of those things. This provides me a position to speak with authority about both of those spheres.

I understand wholly the expenses of putting together a book and the way the market is right now. I understand the stress and frustration of putting a lot of equity into something you aren’t sure will sell. I understand the financial burden of all of that. Those are all very real things.

However, I also know that as an editor, I need to be able to pay to feed myself. I need to pay for my professional organization memberships. I need to be able to pay for the software I use to edit. I need to pay for car repairs, electricity and rent. These are not just wishes. I’m not asking authors to buy me a yacht in the Caymans. I’m hoping I can afford to cover a dental emergency and eat this month.

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

The thing I am noticing is that there are some big names in the industry (I am not going to name them) who believe in paying as little as possible for editing and who treat editors like we’re the fast-food workers of the publishing world. As if we don’t deserve a living wage, and as if we aren’t worth investing in. This attitude is pervasive in author spaces, and it is causing many of us editorial types to have to either leave the field entirely or pick up secondary jobs which cuts into our ability to focus on our editing and continue our education in that sphere.

I’ve also seen that people don’t seem to realize that editors have overhead we have to pay in order to stay in business. We have to pay business taxes (which are not cheap); we have to pay for software; we have to pay for computers and electricity to run them as well as ergonomic setups to allow us to survive at our desks; we have to pay for health insurance; we have to pay for disability insurance; we have to pay for retirement. All of these things factor into our rates.

Why We Charge What We Do

When someone hires me for an edit on a book, they are frequently asking for a full week or more of my available working time. That means they have to pay a week of my expenses of living. Again, we’re not talking a yacht in the Caymans here. We’re talking basic groceries, rent, all those things. Not only that, you are asking someone with a high degree of training and expertise to devote that time and experience to you.

You wouldn’t demand a car mechanic work for under minimum wage and then expect them to do the work of people who work on the Formula One racing circuit. Yet that’s what is demanded of editors. Authors expect a zero error rate (which is impossible to achieve, by the way) while paying us less than we need to meet our basic needs. This is not a recipe for sustainability.

When we go into business, one of the things we editors have to do is look at a combination of how much we need to make to stay afloat, how much we need to be able to live with some modicum of comfort, and how we meet our financial obligations. Those are basic considerations of any business at all. That’s one of the first things you need to look at when you go into business. From there, you take a look at the market and determine where you can meet in the middle and how many hours you have to work (or products you have to sell) to meet that.

I know people who expect us to do a copy edit on a 70,000 word book for around $200. I know people who refuse to pay more than that. Given average editing rate for copy editing fiction, that is going to take about 40 hours to complete. If we are looking at an hourly wage here, the gross income from that, is $5.00/hr. Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Minimum living wage for my state is $23.00/hr, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. That puts us at $920.00, which doesn’t include taxes getting taken out of it. At my per-word rate (on average), I charge $0.015/word. I actually pocket less than the $1050.00 that would be for a 70k word manuscript since a good chunk of that goes to taxes and business expenses.

Keep in mind I also am charging under the median pricing, for my level of experience, too. My pricing is considered mid-tier for a less experienced editor, and I’ve been editing for over sixteen years and worked for many clients and used to own a traditional publishing company.

Now, can editors edit faster than that? Sure, some of us can. However, I refer you to the adage of: Fast, Good, or Cheap — pick two.

Why Use A Human?

Now to address the elephant in the room: AI “editing.” I put that in quotes for a reason. A damn good one.

I am not anti-AI as a rule. I think it has a whole lot of excellent uses and can be a massively helpful tool for the world. Grammarly is a wonderful assistant for business emails, and ChatGPT can help you explore phrasing things different ways. I also use specialized software to help me edit manuscripts faster and cleaner. It isn’t AI, but it’s still machine-driven.

Also, I recognize that the people who are going to use AI to “edit” their books likely were never going to hire a professional editor to begin with. This is to anybody who is still on the fence. I’m not trying to sell you a specific answer here, but there are some things you absolutely must understand.

The first thing is that, no matter what they try to sell you, AI “editing” is incapable of making the judgment calls a human can. Punctuation is more than just a binary “right/wrong” scenario. Editing in general is a complex, nuanced topic that requires an editor to not only understand the language they are working in but also understand the audience, handle the author’s voice, and having some sensitivity about a large number of topics. Not to mention that certain kinds of editing require subject matter expertise as well as expertise on things like story structure.

Editing is more than just fixing commas and misspelled words.

AI does not have those things. While using AI to do a copy edit on a business document before you send it internally might be an entirely reasonable thing to do, it will not carry over into writing a book. Not to mention the fact that inputting things into ChatGPT can lead to your work being internalized by the language model and then used to generate other people’s text.

While ChatGPT can indeed provide you with feedback on your writing, its feedback is not going to be nuanced. It might tell you some useful tips, but they will be incredibly generic ones. That’s because it’s not an expert in anything. It can absorb a lot of data and then spits out an aggregate response.

Some people might argue that’s what editors do, but what we have that computers don’t? Life experience. When a client comes to me for editing, they receive my ability to edit to the Chicago Manual of Style, sure, but they also receive things like my lived experience using real swords. I edit a lot of genres, but one of my specialties is high fantasy or historical because I’ve worn the armor, ridden the horses, fought with the swords, eaten the food, and made the clothing. I have a degree in European history and do historical reenactment as a hobby. In that hobby I teach historical fencing. Prior to that, I used to teach katana and Eastern martial arts. I’ve studied them for many years.

ChatGPT can spit out what it thinks you want, but it cannot actually know for sure whether or not your Roman-era woman would be doing cross stitching. (She wouldn’t, by the way. Cross stitch as we know it was invented in the late 1800s. She might be doing embroidery, but not cross stitch.)

Also, many editors have horror stories of authors who came to them because readers were catching errors, and their refrain was, “I used Grammarly! Why are there still errors?” Honestly, when it comes to fiction, Grammarly often introduces errors. You can’t just accept all its suggestions without knowing how to choose whether or not the suggestion is genuine. There are many cases where all these pieces of software will make recommendations that, if you don’t know punctuation already, can lead authors astray pretty badly.

The Affordability Problem

This is the crux of the issue and the thing I hear most. “But I can’t afford that kind of thing!”

I respect and understand and empathize with that. It’s a reality that we have to deal with in the world: balancing our wants with our bank account. Unfortunately, the cold, hard reality is that book publishing (not writing, but publishing) is a business. And business has overhead costs.

There’s this notion flying around the writing world that somehow publishing a book should be a cheap exercise. That it should be low-cost and bring in profits. This idea is coaxed forward by many people in our world — most of whom are trying to sell people things. These people like to sell “courses” and “books” about making a billion dollars while writing and how to do it the “easy way.”

Keep in mind here, I’m referring to shysters, not industry professionals who advocate for ensuring your business doesn’t beggar you. You can balance cost and benefit and know where and when to trim costs. We can’t all afford everything, and knowing what to trim where will get you a lot of mileage.

Our world is also expensive as hell. Many of us are barely keeping our heads above water, and I also empathize with that, too. It’s hard out there, and if you cannot afford to invest in the process of publishing your book, right now might not be the time to do it.

Also, many editors do accept payments over time. If you cannot afford the lump sum, work with your editor. Many of us allow for monthly payments over a certain time. I’ve even accepted barter a few times when I could afford to so long as the person I was working with had something that really added value to my life or met a need I had in other ways (I’ve done exchanges with other editors, for example, or for cover art or other services).

You can also find less experienced editors who charge lower rates. That said, if someone sounds like what they’re charging is too good to be true, it probably is. Vet the hell out of that person. If they’re a newbie editor and are honest about that, then you might be okay to be in business. A newbie who’s honest about it will definitely be a gamble, but it’s a risk you’re taking on purpose. Someone offering too-good-to-be-true pricing and claiming to be an experienced pro deserves significant scrutiny. Find out why.

Final Thoughts

If you’re still with me at the bottom of this, I want to remind people that, above all, when you’re working with an editor, you are working with a human being. Most of us are deeply passionate about writing and editing and about our professions. Most of us are not wealthy at all (many are barely middle class, if that). Many editors come from backgrounds like disability or neurodivergence. We have studied our profession out of that deep passion I mentioned before, and we truly love what we do.

When I talk about pricing here, I’m not talking about people demanding a huge sum of money for nothing. Editors are book mechanics. We are book doctors. We are highly trained professionals who do our work because we absolutely love it. What we are charging? It’s money to pay for our ability to live. Eat. Feed our kids. Fix our cars. Pay our rent. Pay our medical bills. You are asking a human being to dedicate their work week to you, and in return they are expecting their needs for that time to be covered.

We are not monsters standing between you and your profits. Editors are your cheerleaders, your companions, your friends, and your mentors. And we need to eat, too.