Setting an editing fee

sozobe, can you find out how many pages there are total? You do not want to undersell yourself or your skills. Remember, you are saving this person's hide when it comes to their academic career. In other words, get as much information about the papers, estimate how long it will truly take you to read the stuff and then do your pricing. How much editing is involved? Is it strictly grammar, or are you giving input on the content?

I can see charging 20% below the going rate, but not 50%.


Charging $10 a page sounds fair if the manuscript can be edited by the page. If it has to be completely reorganized, you should charge more.

I would say, "I charge between $10 and $15 a page, depending on how clean and well organized your copy is." Don't buy a pig in a poke.

Two reasons I want to go low:

1.) I do have professional editing experience but it's limited. No matter who I'd be editing for, I'd want to charge on the low side of the spectrum to be fair. (More experience = more expensive.)

2.) This person is a representative of a group that could possibly send much more editing my way, and I want to do what I can to ensure that whatever she has to say is good. A promotional sort of thing I guess (though nothing is guaranteed, there).

OK, I guess a third reason is just that I want to be nice. :-) (She's someone I'll probably see more of in the future even though she's only an acquaintancce now.) So, nice but not CRAZY nice.

I like your formulation, Noddy.

soz :
i assume that you do not want to charge a much higher fee for additional editing work that might come your way ?
if you are lowballing now and jack up your price later you may not only loose the additional business but also a friend .
you could offer your first edit "for free" - tell your friend that you want to do her a favour but that you'll have to charge for any future edit work .
that way you'll gain the experience you need in estimating the time required to do the editing and you'll be able to set a fair price for future work .
wishing you good luck in your endeavour !
hbg

All the advice I've seen on setting rates for work is to start charging on the high side of the going rate, not the low side.

As mentioned earlier, this avoids the problem of raising rates soon after gaining clients.



On the other hand, if it's part-time or short-term work, your approach might be appropriate.

I'd be willing to do it at that price. I was doing professional editing for a while and did get some good experience, it's just that there seemed to be two categories of editing jobs available: a trial leading to full-time work (I don't yet want full-time work) or very short assignments. I was spending so much time rustling up those short assignments that I realized it was coming out to something like $2/ hour in the final analysis, with search time and fruitless application time included. So just having jobs fall in my lap would be worth a lot.

If it turns out that I don't have time for everything (I recently started an ongoing 10 hr/ week job, it includes editing but is a bunch of other stuff too), then I can just be honest about that and raise the fee.

Soz, Ten dollars a page is very steep. Do you get paid $4000 for editing a 400-page manuscript? I don't. If you do, please send me the name and address of your clients. Maybe there's enough to go around.

The work I do is usually by the hour or a flat fee. By the hour work varies for editing starting at $20 an hour.

I edited a master's thesis and charged $200. It was about fifty pages. It took me between four and five hours to complete. That came to about $45 an hour. Not bad. Of course, $10 a page would give you $500--even better.

Set a minimum charge.

There we go... thanks!

I've only done short assignments so far, and haven't really set any prices, just have responded to ads and do it for the amount offered.

These are two academic papers; she's getting her Ph.D (social sciences field, not too much jargon). I've asked how long the papers are (no reply yet). Say they're 20 pages each... what would sound about right to you?

For 20 pages, I'd charge between $75 and $100. For less, it's hardly worth picking up the pen. And I don't charge less then $50 for anything. But 20 pages for $100 is a good price--five bucks a page. It probably won't take you more than 1-2 hours to complete. That's an excellent hourly rate. And the per page price is $5. Not bad at all.

The thing about papers is that they are usually short. You can often set a flat fee that will pay you well and seem fair to the writer.

Soz, I've been thinking about this. First, I think that it's not entirely appropriate for me to compare the situation you're describing with the situation I work in.

I'm paid by big corporations, and I get lots of work from them. You'd be paid by individuals, and you would likely get just a few jobs at most from one person. Since you think that this could become a steady kind of work, I think you need to establish a pay scale that's fair to you and fair to the people who hire you.

If the papers you edit are short (50 pages or less), $3-$5 a page might be reasonable. But consider whether someone would be willing or able to pay you $5 a page for a 100-page paper. $500 is a lot of money to an individual. You might consider establishing a pay scale based on a range of pages.

You also need to be clear on what you'll be expected to do. The editing I'm talking about above is copy editing. Should you have to get involved in reorganization or other big issues, you're no longer copy editing. You're doing developmental editing, which is a more time-consuming process. You should be paid more for this kind of work. I am.

As an aside, I can tell you that I've edited, reviewed, evaluated, and commented on about ten papers, books, etc. for people I know. Only once was I not criticized for the changes or suggestions I made. In a couple of cases, arguments ensued. However, in all but one instance, the people later apologized to me. (They found out I was right.) In fact, I could have done this kind of work more often, but I refused. Who needs the aggravation. I broke my own rule, and did one job recently. It was the one that did not involve any kind of criticism or arguments. Doesn't mean I'd be willing to do it. again. I'm telling you this not to discourage you. Just know that people can be mighty touchy about their writing.

That said, I think this would be a great source of work for you. I think it's a terrific opportunity. I think you'll find an appropriate and fair method for charging for your services. I wish you well.

If there's anything I can do to help or any questions you have for me, just holler.

That's already super useful, thanks. I haven't heard back from this person, plan to go from there. I put lots of qualifiers in my email to her -- "flexible," "what do you think is fair?" -- so I'm hoping I didn't scare her off. We'll see.

I still need to find out more about what I'd be doing, exactly, but I suspect developmental editing. Not just correcting punctuation and neatening up grammar but rearranging paragraphs, helping a thought come through more clearly, that sort of thing. (This person's first language is not English.)

The job I did recently was for someone whose first language is not English. You probably won't get any arguments.

OK, so this job did happen. I got a draft about a week ago -- it was pretty much a disaster. Lots of grammatical errors and such but much deeper problems too. No particular structure (a point would be made, then made again, then made again, with no additional information -- just comes across as filler). But worse than that, lots of unsupported statements of "fact" that are controversial at best.

This is a doctoral thesis. I want to help the guy but am a bit confused about how deep my help should go, ethically. Grammar, fine. Structure, probably fine. "Support your statements," as advice, fine. Helping find support...? (It happens to be a subject I know a fair amount about...)

I'm thinking that last one is where I'd draw the line.

Thoughts?

I think you're right, soz - that last one is his job.

Sozobe--

Ethically you should point out that your client is making unsupported statements. This is what you're being paid to do.

You can't provide the proof for him--it is his academic rep, not yours. Isn't it unfortunate that he got to the doctoral level without being grounded in academic writing standards?

I agree, soz, with your drawn line. It isn't up to you to do research on someone else's thesis.

You might want to consider doing this in two stages. The first stage would be a developmental review. Suggest organizational changes. Point out unsupported statements. Make any other suggestions that relate to the overall work.

Return it to the author for revision. Once the organization is addressed and all the missing info is added, you can dig in for a line for line edit.

If you do this in one stage, all the new info added won't be edited. You'll have to return to do that.

Consider having the author revise and return the ms to you in batches. You can begin working on the revised early sections while the author continues to work on the later sections.

That's what's happening, pretty much.

The author gave me the draft about a week ago. I began work on it and when about halfway through, sent what I had so far along with a longish list of general suggestions, which included advice on how to structure/ organize it. A bit after that, the author said he'd shown it to his prof and the prof had said that a bunch of required analysis simply wasn't there. (I could tell the paper was repetitive but wasn't sure what was supposed to be there instead.)

I then suggested that the author get a new version together and I would edit that.

He said at the time it would be ready by Thursday. A bit later it was Friday. I haven't heard from him since Wednesday -- no paper yet. It's due May 1st.

I thought of this because I offered to meet to discuss things with him while he's still writing this part, and then started wondering how far I'd go with that.

You guys are confirming my own thinking, thanks.