top of page

Make It Easier to Afford an Editor


Some of us truly can’t afford to hire a freelance editor. Although, we really can’t afford not to have our work edited if we want to get our poems or articles published in high-profile journals, want to attract a great publisher for our book, or want to be taken seriously by readers.

Here are 2 solutions for you if you worry you can’t afford an editor’s services:

1. Study and learn to be an expert in the grammar, punctuation, and construction techniques of the language you’re writing, and then meticulously audit your own work. You will probably still make some mistakes and miss some typographical errors, but at least your manuscripts will be cleaner than most of those that are neither self-edited nor edited by professional editors.

2. Learn which errors you tend to commit most often, hunt them out and correct them — and then hire an editor, for a lot less than you might expect, to do what is called “light copyediting.” You may have to beg a few favors from writing peers, and/or editors you’ve worked with before, to find out just what your red flags are, but it will be worth it to you down the road.

Solution 1 will take years of close study to achieve. But if you have absolutely no money left after necessities are taken care of, then you really can’t afford to do anything but be your own editor. Get serious about it. Check out books from the library. Regularly read articles on the Internet written by reputable experts.

Solution 2 is viable, even if you don’t believe it. I’d like you to try looking at the idea another way. Here’s why I think you can afford it — professionals tend to know their business. They know what to look for, what’s wrong, and (usually) they know how to fix it. They know how to fix it fast.


Stock Photo -Stopwatch

Let’s sidestep a minute and talk about hourly rates. You might be nervous about pros who charge by the hour, because you think it’s not a concrete concept and you are afraid you can’t be sure how long the job will take. Even so, you are much better off paying by the hour than for a fixed rate. Many editors know that you have trouble conceptualizing this, though, so they offer page or project rates that are calculated based on their hourly rates. It’s really the same thing to them. But if they work fast, they will make money when they are off the clock if you have settled on a finite amount you can “see,” instead of finding someone you can trust, and, well, trusting her to charge you fairly for time spent on your project.

I offer page rates at Hanninen Freelance Editing because many of you want a concrete breakdown, but I’m also willing to work by the hour, too. Standard copyediting rates ($40 hr, USD) may sound like a lot, but if a job takes 15 minutes to complete, you’re only going to be charged $10.

In the ’80s and ’90s, before print typesetters became largely extinct (today they are still called hand compositors and typesetters, but it’s all computerized and they make a lot less money now), I used to hire them to set print-ready copy for my visual-communications, freelance clients. The good typesetters charged $80 an hour. I could actually afford their work because they were so good (= fast), and most of my graphics copy jobs for brochures, business cards, advertisements, etc., took them only 10-15 minutes to complete. And they only charged me for the time it took: $13 - $25 for professional results.


Stock Photo - Plumber tightening a pipe

When your plumber says he charges $125 an hour to find and get rid of a plugged-pipe problem, you cringe, right? But you’re almost happy to give him your money when he’s done in 20 minutes and your pipes are flowing again. It’s not like your therapist, who charges $110 an hour and you have to stay the whole hour. Well, you don’t have to stay, but you still have to pay for the whole hour. That’s like paying a flat rate for a project.

Let’s move on to the part that makes your editor even more affordable. The part where you do the preliminary editing with a list of known faults. Do you know what yours are yet? Find out. Ask beta readers to honestly list the top 3-5 things that jump out of your writing that bothers them. What do you do more than once in a piece of writing? Which words do you consistently misspell? You need to know what your bad habits are. Ask family. Promise you won’t get mad. Keep your promise.

Read free, self-published ebooks from wherever you can get them and make a list of errors as you run across them. Can you tell when a book hasn’t been professionally edited? Do you stop reading when you run across too many repeated errors in a book? Look for these same types of errors in your own writing.

Create a comprehensive checklist for editing your poems, stories, and articles. Keep it handy when writing or revising, and methodically look for the problems. If you get rid of the traces of your bad habits, a hired editor won’t have to stop and make notes or changes more than just occasionally. What a great read! And how affordable for your wallet.

Many editors will do sample edits, either as a free estimate, or they will deduct the cost of the sample from the project, if you decide to hire them. If your sample is pretty clean when you submit it, the editor will quote you her range for a light copyedit, which is substantially less than for material needing comprehensive editing.

Want a few tips for what to look to eradicate or change in your writing? Here are 2 really big ones that editors come to a halt on all the time:

1. Intentional Repetitions. Many of you writers repeat yourselves too often. If you say the same thing several times, you send a message to readers that you don’t trust them to read carefully enough or to remember. If you want to reinforce information, find a way to change the wording, or plant related material further along in the writing that lets readers make connections of their own.

2. Unintentional Repetitions. Look for repeated words and phrases within paragraphs and pages. Sometimes our brains get in a loop and we don’t even realize we’ve written the same word 6 times in 2 consecutive paragraphs. Substitute synonyms, or change sentence construction to eliminate the need for so much repetition.

Want more tips? Refer to my post about 3 types of cuts for making your writing sharper while striving to meet a specified word-count. And for yet more self-editing tips, keep reading my blog.

Save

0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All
bottom of page