New Writers Ask About Editors: How Can I Tell If an Editor Can Edit?

Okay, so you want to hire someone to edit your book or story or college essay. You may be wondering any or all of the following:

1. Where can I find an editor? 
2. How do I evaluate them before you hire them? 
3. How much might it cost?

You can locate editing candidates in a variety of ways, including the following: 

• Identify friends who may have done some editing and who read your genre, or who are at least avid readers. This isn’t the most likely way to find an editor, but you never know…
• Check your library and/or local bookstores for local writers’ groups. Some of the members might be traditionally or self-published and have experience hiring an editor for their own work.
• Ask around at online writer’s groups or forums. These are also places where the writers may have relevant experience.
• Check for editors, writer’s resource groups or support groups on LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media / networking applications. Chances are good some of the membership of these groups will have worked with freelance editors. LinkedIn has a large network of folks who hire out their editing skills.
• Browse or search services like Guru, Upwork, etc. Or, if you have more money to spend, there are a variety of professional editorial services online. These are sometimes linked with vanity presses that offer soup to nuts book packaging, but you can also select individual services, such as line editing, copy editing or proofreading.

So, let’s say you’ve found a potential editor for your work. How do you evaluate their skills? 

1. Ask them for before and after samples of their work. If you’re working with a service like Guru, members often have samples of their work in a gallery on their page of the website.
2. If you can, you might give your candidate a brief sample to edit. It can be your own work, possibly even work that has already been edited. You might also consider creating a sample based on a published work that is relatively obscure. This means you’d need to “file off the serial numbers” (that is, change names, locations and recognizable plot elements while keeping the construction of the prose). Since the sample has already been fitted, this might alert you to a candidate who likes to change things just to change things or put their fingerprints on your work.
3. You might give the candidate something to edit with explicit instructions. For example, “I’d like you to correct point of view errors, adjust verb tenses, and correct any misused words.” Of course, you’ll need to make sure problems exist in those areas. Ask them to explain their edits. 
4. Ask questions you know the answers to. For example, having seen a number of manuscripts that misused transitive verbs, I might well ask, “What’s the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb? Can you give an example?”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Red Flags you might see waving during this process. For example:

1. The “after” samples contain errors the editor induced or didn’t catch in their own “before” sample.
2. The edits indicate the editor was manufacturing problems—choosing different words than are in the sample, without clarifying or enhancing meaning … possibly even making changes that take the meaning further away from the spirit of the selection.    
3. The editor goes significantly beyond what was asked and essentially reworks your prose. My late writing partner, Michael Reaves, referred to that behavior as “peeing on your story.” You cannot address it, however, with editor obedience classes.
4. The editor seems afraid to edit. This is the opposite of #3 above. This editor fears offending you and therefore bends over backwards to leave your wordings in place even if they’re awkward, clunky, or wrong. I’ve recently been reading an author whose work I like very much, but whose editor is apparently afraid to tell him that he chronically misuses certain words. You want your editor to edit.
5. The editor doesn’t understand your questions or cannot answer them correctly. 

If there are Red Flags, there must certainly be green ones, right? A good editor, as you might surmise, is one who can:

• correct your mistakes,
• point out real problems with plotting, prose and characterization and communicate them clearly,
• preserve your “voice”, style and sensibilities while still editing to the extent necessary to give you a clean, professional manuscript.

What should it cost to have your manuscript edited? That will depend in part on how much editing there is to do and how the editor you choose prices their time and effort. Some editors charge by the page, others by the word, or with flat rates. I prefer to work for an hourly rate because I think it is inherently more fair. It ensures that I am only charging my client when I’m actually working on their story and avoids the pitfalls of flat rates by which, if the manuscript is clean as a whistle, the client pays more than they would if I’d only charged for the time I put in, and if the manuscript needs a lot of work, I don’t get paid for my time.

My example of how much difference this makes involves two manuscripts I worked on some years back. One was a 100,000 word novel by a published author. The book was so clean, virtually all I did was read it, make an edit or a note here and there and recommend restructuring a scene near the end of the book. My hourly rate came to a total of $600.  The flip side of that was a book I edited for which I was paid a $2400 flat fee. Problem was, I’d put in at least twice as much time as that $2400 represented.  

That’s another thing to look for in an editor—someone who is willing to be flexible in their payment plans and who neither lets you overpay or underpay them. If you find a good editor, hang onto them. They are not, as some clients I’ve known suppose, a dime a dozen.   

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