There are many ways to go about hiring a freelance editor to help you with your fledgling manuscript or document. You can trawl through the Yellow Pages, check Google, contact your local Writers’ Centres or dip into the directories of numerous Societies of Editors.
Just as there are hundreds of tradespeople to choose from, so there are hundreds of editors. So you narrow it down. You look for editors who specialise in your subject area. Maybe you take advice from fellow writers, get recommendations.
Finally, you have a list of people who you think would suit your manuscript. So what next?
When you contact a freelance editor and ask about hiring them to go over your work, often they’ll ask to see a sample of your manuscript before they’ll give you a quote for the cost and time it will take to complete the job.
Sounds pretty straightforward, yes? Yet for some reason this process can cause confusion and heartache, and possibly this is because writing is such a personal and creative endeavour. It’s (understandably) hard to suppress the need to impress and the fear of rejection.
The thing is, hiring an editor is really no different to hiring any tradesperson to work for you.* Most people understand that if they want to hire, for example, a plumber, to come and do a specific job, they will need to give them details of the work required in order to get an accurate quote.**
Imagine that you have a house with two bathrooms. One has recently been completely refurbished and just has a leaky tap that still needs repair. The other is completely run-down – all the tiles need replacing, there’s damp and mould. All the fixtures and fittings need repl
acing. In short, it’s a mess. You track down a tradesman with the right skills to do the job and tell him you have work for him. He agrees to come over to quote. You’re a bit embarrassed by the state of the old bathroom, so you just show him the leaky tap in the impressive new bathroom. He duly quotes for the work. You agree to the terms and he comes back the following week – at which point you show him into the old bathroom…
There is confusion. This is not the work he quoted for. This isn’t even the same job. This work will take much longer. It will cost more. It requires different tools. Both parties become equally frustrated.
This sounds like a ludicrous scenario.
But if you want to hire an editor to work on your manuscript, the principle is the same.
When an editor asks for a sample of your manuscript, they are asking because they need to know exactly what will be involved in working on this text.
By looking at sample pages, the editor can advise you as to what is necessary to bring the manuscript up to the standard you require.*** They can see for themselves whether the job will require a few hours simply correcting minor typing errors, or several weeks reworking awkward sentence construction and providing detailed feedback on better story structure. Often, what a writer describes as “a light proofread” can turn out to be “a heavy copy edit” if the author is hoping this will ultimately be a publishable or submittable work. It’s much better to know this up-front, when asking for the quote, rather than finding out once work has started.
When you’re considering which pages to send to the editor, then, it’s important to keep in mind why they are asking for the sample in the first place:
It’s not because they are short of reading material – they don’t need the whole manuscript at this point, and it’s unlikely that they need all the back story. The editor won’t be reading for enjoyment or to get a feel for the story at this stage, they just need to see what work and time is involved in the edit.
It’s not because they want to see how well you can write. At least, not the way you might be thinking. You are potentially hiring this editor to work for you, not the other way around. Although they will be giving you feedback at the end of the edit, it should be honest feedback that you have asked for. Remember, this is not someone who is going to offer you a publishing contract. This is not part of a submission process. This is not about impressing anyone.
Sending through the five 
shiniest pages you have worked on solidly with a writing group may well prove to the editor that you have talent, but it won’t help with the quote if the other 450 manuscript pages turn out to be littered with disjointed dialogue, poor spelling and faulty grammar. It is in both your interests and the editor’s to send an “honest” sample so that you can get a proper quote.
As a writer, you will be understandably protective of your work. Editors know that you want to make sure that the person who will be working on your words really “gets” it. We know how important it is to you that we grasp every nuance. But these are concerns for the editing stage, not the quoting stage, even if it is tempting to add a few more chapters to the sample, and to send only the cleanest and best pages through. The finer details of the story don’t come into the calculations as to how many hours it’s going to take to correct all the punctuation and grammar, or whether it is likely to need a structural edit rather than a proofread.
Once you have the quote in hand, you can decide whether or not it suits your purpose. If this is your first time hiring an editor, make sure you’re really ready and keep in mind what that quote was for. That might sound stupid, but the perfectionist tendencies that see writers send in their most polished pages for a quote are the same ones that result in major rewrites post-quote. In theory there is nothing wrong with this, of course, except that an editor who has quoted for a 50,000 word manuscript will be just as surprised on receipt of a 150,000 novel as a tradesman would be on discovering that a bathroom refit suddenly also includes a kitchen refurbishment.****
What do you think? Does the quoting process send you quivering into a quandary over the perfect sample pages? Are you an editor? What are your tips? Do you drink tea, and if so, what’s your favourite?
*Editors probably work a little more quietly but they likely consume just as much tea. If not more.
**I know. You’re all just aching to tell me your home renovation/tradie horror stories. That is an entirely different blog topic. I shall not be moved. This is my metaphor, which is full of sunshine and happiness, tradesperson-wise.
***This is actually another important point – what sort of standard does the document need to be? Do you just want to get it to the next draft? Is it to be used in-house? Does it need to be publishable? Submission-level? Do you want to learn from the edit? This affects how the editor approaches the job as much as the style of edit.
**** In editing, this is an extremely common phenomenon. I didn’t even have to exaggerate the word count. I’m not sure how common the home renovation scenario is, to be fair, but I am not sure I have ever received a manuscript that hasn’t been worked on “just a bit” between quoting and start of editing.
I’m certainly going to share this post far and wide – thank you for your insights.
It’s quite a challenge to provide a quote from an example (although that’s pretty much the only way to do it). I tend to quote an hourly rate based on the number of pages I expect to edit per hour, then if the presented document has suddenly grown in size or difficulty, I have the flexibility to recoup what I put into it.
Convincing writers that we editors are there to*help*, that we want their words to be the very best, can be hard.
So my tip for writers – your editor is your collaborator, not your enemy.
Desolie
Thanks, Desolie!
Yes, quoting can be a challenge. Of course you can’t see everything about a project in a few pages. And you do need the writer to let you know additional factors: if it’s a series you may need to add in time to make yourself familiar with those stories and the style; if it’s a non-fiction work it’s important to know if a large chunk of the manuscript is going to be tables and charts, or if there’s going to be an additional 200-page index tacked on at the end (sometimes people think that is just a quick check and “doesn’t count”).
All these things, as you say, are about ensuring the editor is able to do the best work possible on the manuscript. You’re absolutely right: editors want to collaborate with the writer to make the manuscript the best it can be. It’s why editors do what we do – and in this case it’s what the writer is hiring the editor for. But in order for that to happen, the editor needs to be able to prepare for the job from first contact with the writer.
This is a great introductory post for writers starting to head down the path of sourcing their own editors. Frankly, I see a massive boom in self-sourced literary professionals now that self-publishing digitally is a much more viable path; illustrators, typesetters, proofreaders – all the services that would once have been provided inside a publishing house.
I’ll follow Desolie’s steps and post a link to this blog as well. Writers can be…very attached…to their work (I was being polite) and learning how to approach a literary service professionally is also very important.
As for finding your editors? Well, I hope that in the next few months my business partner and I will be able to add a ‘just go to this web site and filter by your project!’ option!
Thanks, Tom!
Yes, digital self-publishing has changed many things – there are certainly a lot more people considering that path who may not have done before.
I think most editors understand that writers are both attached to and protective of their work
We just need to let those writers know that we care, too. And let’s not forget – although the writer might hire an editor for advice and editorial changes, they’re not actually forced to keep the changes or take the advice. So it’s not quite the same as having a tradesman come in and demolish a few walls of your house – that’s so much harder to “undo” if you don’t like what they’ve done.
Love the idea of the “filter by project” section on your website – best of luck with it!
I’m overextending your analogy in my mind… Imagine the look on a plumber’s face if you yelled at them, ‘NO! I want the pipes to run AROUND like I said on the plan. You just don’t UNDERSTAND ME! No one wants to see plastic corner joins like that!’
I’m sure you’ve encountered some editing…experiences like that.
I bet there are a number of plumbers who have EXACTLY those kinds of stories…
As an editor who has recently gone freelance so that I can concentrate on fiction, I find quoting the hardest part of my job. I used to be able to rely on an employer to sort out that side of it.
I generally look at a sample (customers have sent me anything from 3 pages to the whole book – since it is all done on email the whole book is fine and I can see the word count and choose a random sample rather than a polished section) and then I quote per word. I find the per-word method best as sometimes the customer’s original word-count estimate is not the same as the manuscript I actually get. I should have a good idea by then of how many hours that many words will take me for that particular author.
At first I was stressed about asking what can seem like a big chunk of money and once agreed to a large discount which I deeply regretted later when the work took me 50 hours – now I accept that the work I do is valuable and can really help the author on the road to publishable quality.
Hi Natalie!
Yes – it can be hard to remember that our work is valuable when, monetarily speaking, it is so undervalued in the industry. It can take a while before you start to recognise the likely length of time any given job will take and what is actually expected of you based on the budget in that situation – but sometimes there’s no helping the fact that things take longer than anticipated.
I think it’s tempting for all of us to shy away from charging what we’re worth. Particularly when someone is hiring an editor privately for the first time, they can be shocked by what seems to be a huge quote and a natural response to that can be to promise to drop the rate. I am sure I am not the only one who does two sets of calculations – one (private) set based on what the job is likely to require in terms of hours and effort and another based around the more realistic figure that actually fits the market rate!
I think it’s important to remember the work that’s involved. That “big chunk of money” can be several days or even weeks or months of steady work, depending on the job. Often I think people assume editors are just reading, that the work only takes a few hours of light reading. Many of them assume it’s something that is done as a pastime and forget they have actually contacted a professional. It’s only when they get the marked-up manuscript back that they realise how detailed and painstaking the work really is. I always try to explain very clearly what the edit will involve so there’s no confusion.