a freelance editing Q&A

[lauraanne_gilman]

in comments, fakefrenchie asked: When you give an estimate for freelance editing of a novel, do you give a per hour rate and estimate the time it will take you to do the job? If so, what happens if you have to take more time because the novel needs a lot of work. If not, do you give a bulk rate for doing the edits for the whole book and hope that it will take you less time than you thought?

I'm quite curious as to how other people do the estimate deal, so any of you out there who do this for a living, feel free to chime in.


For global edits (aka 'revision letters') and line-editing, I have an hourly rate, and give an estimated costing up-front, based on expected hours required for the project. After *cough* many years of doing this, I know within a few hours how long an average-length genre novel of middling competence and complexity will take me to work through, and I give my quote based on that. Half the quote is due when the work begins, and the finalized half is due on completion. If I am doing both a revisions read/global edit and a line edit, I can cut a few hours off the total because some of that overlaps.

If the book is in worse shape, or requires additional work (research, or consults with the author) then the extra time is added to the final payment.

Most of my corporate clients have an agreed-upon flat fee, but those projects are usually in pretty good shape when they come to me (and if they're not, the managing editor knows this, and pays me more). It works out to about the same, on a per-hour basis, as my individual clients (and yes, I do give SFWA-member discounts).

I also do developmental editing (working with an author who has an idea but no structure), which is also billed hourly, and submission evaluations (vetting the package) and copy-writing (back/flap copy, ad copy, etc) for a flat fee.

Whew. I should just cut-and-paste this into my new brochures. If I ever actually had time to do them up....