Doing what I can for you guys

Now I’ve just realized my last post on working with an independent editor was back around NaNoWriMo, which is kind of silly. That was a really long time ago.

So let’s talk a little about working with an editor. You guys want to do it. I know you do, because you keep writing to me.

But the cost.

I know. It sucks. I am so on board with you about that. And I had a brilliant idea last night over the dinner table that if there are grants out there to help out people like you hook up with people like publishers, and I could qualify in helping you do that, then I could offer rates you might realistically be able to afford. Like $5/hour or something.

Okay, I’m probably not going to be able to drop my rates that far. But I AM going to talk to Mira over at Mira’s List about it and see what she’s dug up. Because I didn’t get into this originally to discover the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kerouac, but damned if I don’t accidentally keep doing it. Not them, personally. (They’re dead.) But really amazing writers doing fresh, exciting, gorgeous work, who just need a good, experienced editor to help them make it read professionally.

However, you know what one huge, overriding characteristic of most literary novelists is? That’s right. They’re BROKE.

Yeah. Me, too.

So until most aspiring writers get someone to help them out a little financially—like a publisher; or a rich parent—they’re stuck cleaning quarters out of the couch cushions and skimping on their lunch money and generally emptying their lives of anything that costs anything at all, and still only being able to afford a few precious hours of editing time.

I do what I can, working longer hours on their manuscripts than I claim I do (and I can’t tell you how many clients have admitted, much later, that they almost didn’t hire me because my rates were so low they thought I couldn’t possibly know what I’m doing), offering Free Edits, almost killing myself with that Workshop Month from Hell last fall—which, as you might have noticed, has vanished from my blog. I’m hustling. And not because I’m making very much. (That noise in the background in my husband laughing uncontrollably.)

But because. . .

I LOVE FICTION.

And I know how to edit it. I can polish diamonds-in-the-rough to reveal what the writer has really done, the fiction in there that they don’t even realize they’ve created. And I love that.

This is such a great job. Really—working with these fun, creative, interesting writers I’ve gotten to know and made friends with over the past year, watching their manuscripts grow and develop, and being able to show them where their plots need tightening (or loosening) and rearranging, what’s implied in their characters that can be brought out in specific ways in specific scenes to really flesh-out the imaginary people living in their heads, how to keep their stories focused, always, always focused, on their premises so their climaxes become inevitable, extraordinary, unique. . .their own. And if they can afford Copy & Line Editing, the sheer joy of seeing those sentences clarify and blossom into strong, streamlined, professional literature. If I didn’t have a child who also needs my time and attention, my husband would probably never even see my face.

But I do have a child. And a husband. And the hours I take away from them I have to make worth it in some way that’s tangible to them.

Also—and this is really pertinent—people value stuff they pay for more than stuff they get for free. And you know what? This work I do on manuscripts is valuable. Heck, yes, it is. I don’t have even the slightest interest in doing it for people who are going to then dismiss it as trivial because I didn’t make them pay through the nose.

So I charge $50/hour, which is 50-100% less than the going rate of $75-$100/hour. However, my per-word and per-page charges look high compared to the going rates. How come?

Because I DON’T SKIM.

I did some research the other day and found that a lot of independent editors are charging both $75-100/hour AND $.02-4/word at around $6/page.

You can do the math. That averages out to 12-16 pages/hour, which means spending 3.75-5 minutes on each page. I don’t know about you, but I can spend several minutes just absorbing a page for analysis, much less editing it, analyzing it, and writing out seriously useful advice on how to improve it. Even at $50/hour, the surface cheap rate is still only 7 1/2 minutes/page, or an hour and fifteen minutes to do the whole works on a ten-page chapter. Try it. That’s not very long.

Skimming can be a real hazard in this industry, when you’re struggling to make a living wage. These cheaper rates, whether they’re called copy-editing or just “editing,” could only mean very light copy-editing.

I don’t do that.

But I have just re-vamped my Services page today. So if you’re out there hoping to find an editor you can trust to work on a manuscript you’ve lavished so much work and heart and love on, please feel free to check it out. (But be forewarned: my proofreader is busy working her real job today, and I’m brain-dead from checking and double-checking the math, so today’s draft might be full of typos.)

And if you’ve been through that couch a dozen times and still only come up with a handful of loose change, feel free to check out the Art and Craft of Fiction magazine, where I’m writing on the craft and working with broke aspiring writers every week to get them the help they need as cheaply as humanly possible.

And if you can’t even afford that, stick around.

Next month we’ll be publishing The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual, which is my old posts on the craft from last year before I went private with the magazine—all cleaned up and edited and organized to make writing fiction as intuitive as possible. WITH brand-new extra essays on topics I forgot to cover last year!

I’m doing everything I can for you guys. I swear to god.

You’re like my kids.