If you’re intent on publishing a great book, editing is the most important investment you can make.

While self-editing is an important part of the process, it has inherent limitations. Namely, you’re too close to the work to see what’s wrong with it – if you knew, you’d fix it! The only way to overcome those limits is to do the best you can in editing your own work in preparation for a proper edit by a trained professional.

But, as with any service that requires you to hire a professional with years of training and experience, determining the cost of book editing can be overwhelming. To help you understand average rates and the array of factors you need to consider, we’ve surveyed the industry. Here we’ve highlighted the most essential facts, so you can have a clearer sense of what your manuscript might cost to edit—when it’s time to self-publish.

What kind of editing do you need? 

The needs of one writing project can vary substantially from that of another. Therefore, it’s best practice that an editor read and assess your manuscript to determine what type(s) of editing will best help take your book to the next level. Those types of editing are as follows:

• Copy Editing (sometimes called stylistic or line editing) corrects errors in grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation and other mechanics of style—ensuring the manuscript is clear, consistent, correct, and complete on a line-by-line basis.

• Content Editing (sometimes called structural editing; often overlapping with stylistic editing) provides valuable insights into the manuscript’s content and structure—in addition to addressing its technical and mechanical needs.

• Proofreading is conducted as a final review, typically following book formatting and layout, which gives a full visual check and corrects any erroneous cross-references, missing words, and misspellings.

While we recommend that manuscripts receive a content edit at minimum, it is best practice for a copy edit and proofread to follow. This multi-pass approach ensures that your book is structurally sound while also reducing the presence of credibility-diminishing errors upon publication.

Average industry editing costs – and five other factors to consider

We used a 60,000 word manuscript (the average word count of a FriesenPress-published book) as the basis for our study, so the above numbers only consider the type of edit needed and the length of a manuscript. These averages will give you a strong sense for the cost of book editing, but you’ll find there are many other influential factors to consider:

• WORD COUNT
  While some editors will charge you based on how much time is spent on a manuscript, most editors will base their pricing on the length of your manuscript. Costs are typically charged per word or per 100 words.

• COMPLEXITY
  Consider the editorial needs of a theoretical physics textbook versus those of a novella; if you have a dense manuscript that needs to adhere to a particular style guide and includes hundreds of footnotes and citations, it’ll undoubtedly cost more to conduct a serious in-depth review. Also, don’t forget that you could have many iterations and different types of edits over time as a result of your manuscript’s complexity.

• GENRE
  Each genre can affect how intensive it is to edit. It’s particularly a determining factor in cases where you have niche subject matter that requires an editor with specialist expertise to appropriately assess your work in context. For instance, historical fiction might require extensive fact-checking, and so an editor with a background in history (perhaps even the era you write about) will have more insight than a generalist.

• YOUR WRITING EXPERIENCE
  If you’re a new writer, there is a greater possibility of your manuscript suffering from grammatical mistakes, confusing structure, plot holes, general inconsistencies, etc. As a result, a new writer’s manuscript will often take more time (or more rounds) to edit, and therefore have an increase in cost. Many editors break each edit type down into a “simple” and “complex” tier to indicate the level of attention the text needs. Naturally, all these factors can be mitigated with further experience, and by ensuring you send your manuscript in the best possible condition for your editor.

• EDITOR’S EXPERIENCE & ACCREDITATION
  It should be expected that the greater the experience or specialized expertise an editor has, the heftier a price they can charge. Among more seasoned editors, you’ll also find professional accreditations that demonstrate their elevated abilities. Accredited editors are trained, vetted, and certified by industry organizations, like Editors Canada, and can charge over twice as much as the averages listed above.

*We found that American services were not only outright more expensive, but with the added currency conversion for Canadians, the difference in what you pay can be incredible.

How to move your book forward

While the cost of book editing varies per project, you should now have a ballpark figure of what it’ll cost to edit your book, plus some additional variables that could affect the final price. To avoid unnecessarily inflating that number, we recommend putting together the most polished manuscript you can. After that, it’s simply a matter of finding the right editor at the right price.

With FriesenPress you're not only hiring a partner to help you mechanically polish your manuscript, you’re also developing an invaluable relationship that can grow with each subsequent book you publish. With our diverse pool of accredited editors, we can pair you with one who best suits you and your book’s needs. Our editing team is staffed with experienced professionals to cover all genres, each possessing accreditation to Editors Canada standards and the passion to help authors create the best books possible.