Can I Ask for That? How to Negotiate with an Editor

Transcript

Finding the editor that suits your needs can be something of a process. One of the biggest points to consider is how much their services will cost.

How do editors set their rates? Is there room to negotiate? And if so, how can a writer approach this important question for their project?

I'm Mary Brydon-Kehoe, writer and owner of Elixir Editorial. Divine the secrets of the written word together with me in The Laboratory.

First things first, it's important to note that rates can vary pretty widely between different editors. Editors are individuals. If they're freelance, they're going to be setting their own rates. If they're in-house, they're going to be working as part of the publisher, and it's unlikely that you'll actually be going through any of the rate process with them.

So in my capacity as a freelance editor, I'm going to be talking about if you are an indie author, let's say, and you're looking to have me look over your manuscript, if you're looking to engage my services to help you get published.

So like I say, the first thing to note is that rates are extremely individual to the editor. But if you're engaging an editor, you have to understand that the rates are actually based on how we make a living for ourselves. There are a lot of tools out there that can make this a little bit easier to calculate, and those are the types of things that we lean on when we're making those decisions. Our business, like any business, has to be viable for us in order to keep it going.

There are also sort of industry standard rates, let's say, and there are rate calculators that you can look at. I think it's the Editorial Freelance Association (EFA) actually has a really good calculator that you can see. And you can double check the kind of service that you're getting, the kind of work that it is. Sometimes these prices are dependent on the experience of the editor as well.

Keep in mind that editing is not just an investment from the business side of things, it's also an investment for you as an author to make sure that your work is the best that it can possibly be. So it's important that you set your budget expectations accordingly.

Now how does an editor actually determine the rate for a project? So some editors might actually post their rates very visibly. It's rare that you'll be able to see an all-inclusive cost though, so we tend to break it down in terms of maybe a range, maybe an hourly rate, that type of thing. A lot of editors will treat each new project as its own cost. And the reason for that is because each different project we handle has a different goal. It might have a different medium that you're handling, might be a different genre, might be a different audience, tone. The type of service that you're providing might be different.

So for example, if I was to do a structural edit of a manuscript, that takes me a different kind of time and effort than, let's say, if I was doing a copy edit of that same manuscript. You might actually need a lighter structural edit than you would need for a copy edit. Maybe the copy edit is heavier, it's more involved. Or maybe it's vice versa. Maybe your structure is something that you want to focus on—that's the real goal of the edit of the review—and copy editing is not something that you're necessarily going to be too worried about.

Now, if you were to go to two different editors for this, for example, which can be recommended (there are benefits for going back to the same editor as well if they've already handled the material), but let's say you hand off your manuscript to me, for example, to Elixir Editorial, and you're looking to have that structure reviewed. Now how I price my structural edit might be different from the next person that you could have talked to. But the other thing is that my structural edit is not going to be the same as, for example, a copy edit would be, and especially not a copy edit from a different editor.

The fact that a project can vary so widely between not just different editors and different services, but also between different projects—you as an author might be looking for something a little bit different than the last person that we had a project with—which means that we have to be very careful and very transparent about approaching our rates.

Now I've seen some of my colleagues that will put out ranges of rates, for example. And that's a perfectly viable way of doing that. I actually—I like the transparency there. It gives you an idea of sort of the upper threshold, the lower threshold of what you can expect from that particular person. And some people prefer to do this because, let's say if you were to try and put an hourly rate to it, hourly rates can be difficult because it's entirely dependent on a time that we don't necessarily know what that's going to look like at the end of the day. We're trained, we're taught how to calculate and how to estimate a project and how long it's going to take, but things come up and sometimes we're actually met with different problems in the material than we might have seen at the beginning. Anything like that, any obstacles that we hit, or if we have to, let's say, respond to you or we're waiting on a response from you rather, we need to give ourselves that time and that might affect the timeline. The hours that you anticipate spending on a particular project can vary quite widely, and for that reason, hourly rates just tend not to be great ideas.

It also depends on the editor themselves. So an editor who is very regimented, for example, they have a very specific schedule, they track their hours really specifically, they might do better with an hourly rate. But if you're like me and sometimes you work on things a little bit, you know, it could be a different time of day, it could be a little bit here and there, or it could be a very big long focused time, it's more difficult to kind of get a sense of that average spend, that average hourly spend that you're going to be making on a project.

So as an editor, as somebody who likes to make sure that everything is as transparent as possible, it's my preference that I am able to kind of see the whole scope of something, and I can provide a detailed breakdown of a quote on that basis. That's not to say that you can request an hourly rate. Hourly rates sometimes make more sense for situations like coaching, for example, but in the case of a beginning to end project that you can estimate the timeline on and you can get a good grasp of what you're getting into, it's almost certainly going to be better, both as a motivator to get the work done as quickly as possible on the editor's side, but also so that you're protected as a client.

Smaller projects might be better for hourly. Bigger projects, you might be better off looking at an all-in quote.

Now with that in mind, with all of our secrets kind of out there, you want to have an idea of your own budget. So you as an author, you want to make sure that you're really in tune with the idea of what you're spending, what you're looking to spend, what you're willing to spend on your project, because at the end of the day, it is your project. And what you spend can have a direct correlation to how successful it is, how much benefit, how much value maybe, let's say, you're going to get out of working with an editor.

You don't necessarily have to spend your life savings on something like this, but it is a good idea to maybe highball your expectations, maybe take the upper sort of bracket of what you're looking at to spend, and maybe do a little bit of digging into those rates into some of those standard per-word rates. Per-word rates can be really good as a basis of understanding for where editors are pulling their own rates. But if you go in knowing what your expectations are, that's going to allow you to really target your search to the individuals who match that expectation. It helps because you're not going to be getting into any awkward situations. I know that I like to go in fully armed, fully aware of what I'm getting myself into.

And like I say, the Editorial Freelance Association has a rate calculator to determine those industry standards. Now one thing to note is that I'm speaking to you from Canada, and the EFA actually has all of its rates posted in USD. So remember to do any conversions necessary when you are doing that research.

And like I say, these are ranges. So they still might vary based on, first of all, the experience of the editor, what kind of packages they might have, other factors—maybe they're offering a discount. And like I say, sometimes we're really excited to work with a particular indie author. We want to make it as accessible as possible. We'll try and work with you on that rate that we can get you that is accessible

Which then brings us to the question of the day, how do you approach negotiating? So if negotiating is something that if you hear the word, you kind of get squicked out, you don't like it, you're thinking you're going to run for the hills, I completely understand you.

There's something to be said for approaching a business situation like this, because it is a business situation. It's a service that you're hiring someone for, with the hope that if you're putting in this investment, you're going to be seeing a return on it. You know, you want to have the best shot that you possibly can when you're walking in to either publish yourself or to actually contact a traditional publisher after you have it reviewed. You want to make sure that it's going to catch their attention.

And something that's sort of inherently transactional, I understand that can put people into a bit of a situation where they feel uncomfortable. It doesn't feel necessarily maybe authentic to say, “Hey, can you lower your prices?” But there's another way to approach this that might sit better with people if you understand sort of the background of it, and as an editor, what my rationale would be if somebody were to come to me and ask me about my prices and if I can change them.

If a price is higher than you're expecting it to be, if it's something that's more than you're comfortable with, first of all, how realistic is it to ask them to lower their prices? Are you talking, you know, maybe you just need them to shave off a couple hundred dollars. Or is it in the thousands of dollars? Because depending on how long your manuscript is, how intensive of an edit it is, these things can get up into the thousands of dollars.

So first take a step back maybe and ask yourself, “Okay, so if I was in this person's shoes, and if I was offering this service, how reasonable would I think this request is?” As a client, you can absolutely ask us if there's any wiggle room. Certainly you can ask me. I don't know that I can speak for all of my colleagues, but I think that's a fairly common experience that we have as, you know, small business owners. It doesn't hurt to ask at the end of the day. The only thing that we can say is “No,” which is, again, fair.

But because this is the whole question: how do we negotiate successfully? Or maybe: what will make you more successful more frequently if you were to ask an editor for this kind of thing? The first thing really to do is to not just ask for a lower price. Unless the editor is actually able to offer a discount of some kind on their own, which they likely already have if you're coming to them, they may not have as much wiggle room on the rate as set for that particular service. What I would instead coach people to do, and what's actually recommended as part of our industry training, is to look to the process.

If the editor has a really good grasp on their process—for example, how many passes they might take over the course of a project—there might be certain steps that they might be able to actually cut out for you. If the second pass focuses more on, let's say, small logical inconsistencies, and if that's not something that you're ultimately very concerned with, then they might actually be able to reduce that down to just one pass.

The idea is that while we're still, you know, some of us are still not posting hourly rates, at the end of the day, as editors, or maybe more so as business owners, we have to account for how much time our services are taking to render to our clients, as well as how much money that represents over a longer period of time. Let's say an editor quotes you $1,000 for a job; where they have to hold themselves accountable is knowing how long that's going to take them, and realistically what that looks like in terms of an hourly breakdown. If they're spending an awful lot of time on the checking of logic and consistency in a manuscript, cutting that one step out might actually save you a lot of money.

Now equally, if not more so, you need to be aware of how is this going to actually impact the end product that I am looking to receive from this person. If you're taking the time and money to actually hire an editor, you want to make sure that you are really targeting those things that are going to be hard for you to pick up on. So let's say that your forte is actually in checking for those logical inconsistencies—it doesn't make sense for you to necessarily hand off your project to an editor to check for those same things. But if you have a hard time with it, that's what you're going to want to prioritize.

It's also important to note that no editor is going to be perfect, no human being is going to be perfect, and I would argue that even “not human beings” are imperfect when it comes to this type of thing. You know, Editors Canada actually has a section on rates of error—acceptable rates of error in the industry—because as editors, the main point of us is to really focus on those things that are going to be egregious for your readers. It's our job to think about how they're going to receive it versus you, whose job it is to get the words on the page. But of course, if you are invested in your own project, you're going to want to make sure that it's within the realm of acceptable errors. And it just always helps to remember that no one is going to be perfect in any situation.

Okay, maybe if you have a 250-word document that you'd like to edit—that's great if you want someone to look at that for you. Then you have, perhaps, a more reasonable expectation of something approaching perfection. And I would still say “approaching” because editing—while we do have training, we do have industry standards that we're relying on, and that are informing us of how to do our work—perfection, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder for something that is oftentimes an actual art form. If you're writing creative fiction, if you're writing poetry, that sort of thing (editing poetry is its own skill). But what I mean to say is that one editor might have one idea, another editor might have a different idea of what you're trying to get to, what you're looking for that final product to actually shape up to. And that's why before you even get to this stage of negotiating, let alone actually looking at the prices of different editors, you're going to want to make sure that you've done a little bit of background digging, you want to make sure that they are going to kind of elevate your voice and the message and all the things that you think are really important in your work. But I digress!

If you are happy with a certain focus that your editor can really pin down, that's a great way to kind of shave off some of those steps and shave off some of that time ultimately. The “quality” that you might be sacrificing, if you want to call it that, isn't so much in terms of “We're going to just completely skip over things,” but we might not be going through it with as fine-tooth a comb. We might just do what is a little bit maybe more surface level. If it's a first pass, for example, those are typically—what I do—it’s like you have a wider tooth comb. You're going to catch the big, big stuff that your readers are going to notice.

After that point, second passes oftentimes are where I highlight because they might be something that I revisit and I determine later that “Oh, I just read that kind of awkwardly.” It might be something that caused me to pause a little bit, but a lot of the time that's because as editors we're supposed to kind of watch for things. If something feels ambiguous to us, we'll take time to look it up. But if there's that kind of grey area to push around a little bit, or to kind of feel out, your readers are less likely to actually pick up on those types of things. Are your readers going to pick up on a split infinitive? Some people might pick up more on commas. Some people might pick up more on usages of words. And if you think about it, in everyday speech, we use things incorrectly all the time.

When it's in writing, it's a little bit more formal than that, but some of the same rules still apply. I mentioned in a previous podcast that diction can stand out if you use the same word over and over and over again. That's the type of thing that might actually stand out in your reader's mind. That might be something that you're more likely to focus on as a reader, and it might hamper your experience, hamper your enjoyment of reading the material. That's the type of thing that you're going to want to look at rather than, “Okay, is on page 357—did we format the numbers the same way as we did in the previous… however long ago it was—page 2?” I highly doubt you're going to have readers who are going to be going through with a highlighter (maybe unless they're a copy editor) and pointing out all of the areas where you made a mistake. (And if anything, really, it’s—I'd say it's more like people are going to wonder, “Well, who edited this?” if that comes up, actually.) So you're in safe hands if you do decide to focus a little bit more on the things that are going to jump out to people.

When you're actually writing, those are the things that I tend to coach people on to actually look for. Because you can prevent a lot of that stuff just by being kind of aware of those issues. And then say later, you might actually save time—let's say, for example, if you use a book coach, you're actually getting kind of a developmental editor sitting next to you the whole way. You might not catch absolutely everything, but I've heard certain other book coaches actually in the industry say that doing that, spending that time there, having that service right up front saves you a lot of time, saves you a lot of money. Because you're already aware of those big glaring issues, and if you do choose to hire an editor after that, they can really focus on the nitty-gritty details, the little teeny tiny parts of it that are going to stand out to, let's say, an editor or even a publisher, for example, if you're going down that traditional route.

Now, mentioning book coaching, that actually kind of brings me to my last point that I want to make here, which is that there are sometimes alternatives within the editing realm within the scope of publishing and the different kinds of professionals who can offer you assistance or support.

One of those things, service-wise, is actually manuscript evaluations. It's something that I actually offer as a service. And those types of services are really geared for people who—you might not have an idea of what kind of editing you might need, you might be kind of new to the whole thing. It's a little bit scary, it's a little bit daunting to start out on this path. And a manuscript evaluation is a more affordable, maybe in the short term, way of approaching your manuscript and getting it reviewed by a professional.

What that actually looks like in practice is typically that you hand off your manuscript to an editor and they will look it over for you, they'll read through the whole thing. They'll actually provide you what looks quite similar to a book report, actually, but it's going to be all of the ways that you can kind of tackle, you know, “Here are the things that you need to pay more attention to,” maybe some suggestions to apply more broadly to the text. People who can apply sort of those concepts within their own work—if they can actually take those lessons and apply it more broadly, or those overarching concepts from the feedback that you receive—you're going to do really well with that.

Ultimately, it's going to be more work on your end as the author to actually apply those concepts and those suggestions. And you need to really keep a keen eye out for what those look like in the rest of the material because we're not going to catch everything—the whole point is that we'll be giving you examples to draw from. But if you can do that, if you can take that and run with it, then you're in a really good position.

And then who knows, you might actually come back to work with that editor. I know some people have talked about people returning to them, doing a manuscript evaluation, and then actually asking them to either coach them through it or do kind of a developmental edit at the same time, or just after they've done the manuscript evaluation, so that they can take another pass at a second draft. And I think book coaching kind of occupies some of that same space as well. Because it's very package-based or it's a specific time-based thing, you're not always going to get all of your pages reviewed unless that's what you're specifically asking for and if that's what you're paying for. But a lot of the times people will have packages where it's that they review, let's say up to five pages, and then you're going to meet with them every week for an hour or something like that to discuss those five pages.

That's definitely a thing to consider because the cost might be a little bit more manageable if it's in chunks. That might be something that may be eligible more for something like a payment plan. But again that's going to depend on the book editor or the book coach that you're actually approaching.

One of the other strategies that I mentioned is to look for editors who are actually running promotions. Sometimes, let's say, if you are hooked up with an editor through a writing group (We do visit those too; I have a couple of writing groups that I'm lucky to be a part of), some of us might actually offer pro bono work or discounts or things like that. Maybe a little bit different from an old-fashioned family and friends discount, but the same kind of rules apply.

The other thing that's worth noting about writing groups is that because the editor might have already heard some of the material, read some of the material, they might actually have a bit of a leg up if you were to hand that material off to them later to actually do a full edit. They might require less up-front cost of getting up to speed. And that can save time and of course money down the line if they think that they're going to be able to get through it a little bit faster.

But I know that I offer pro bono work the odd time because I want to support the community—I want to be part of the community. Now these are typically people that I know, but the odd time you might see me post a code on the website, and you can use that toward a future project.

And lastly, the other thing to note is that, again, because this process can be very customizable, depending on the editor that you approach, you might actually be able to have some work edited in part, then return to the rest later. Or again, apply your learning to the rest of the materials.

Let's say the manuscript evaluation is a little bit too broad for you to successfully apply, or you feel like it's going to be too broad for you to actually take those lessons and use them throughout the rest of the manuscript. If you ask someone to edit, let's say, the first 20,000 words of 100,000 words, that's going to be a fifth of the cost compared with if you actually had edited the entire manuscript or had the entire manuscript edited. And what that does for you is it allows you to get a good sense of the kind of work that the editor is themselves doing. What kinds of things they're picking up on, giving you a lot of really good examples—20,000 words is not a small amount of words by any means, but it is different from 100,000. And 100,000 is of course going to take you a lot more time to get through. But if you, the author, feel comfortable taking the things that you learned in the first 20,000 and then applying it to the rest of the manuscript, then you're going to have saved potentially a lot of money there.

Now, again, I would come back to how we even come up with quotes in the first place when you're approaching this kind of situation. As the author, you want to make sure that you're taking into account the audience needs, you're taking into account what publication method you're using. And really, really think about, for example, if you're going to be handing that off to a traditional publisher afterward, they might have their own editors, they can focus on that copy edit, they can focus on the small details. And if you've gone to the trouble of hiring an editor to help you with that first 20,000, then your success with the rest of the words—if you were able to apply sort of the lessons learned from that first 20,000—it might be a little bit easier for them to get into. It might be something that they're able to spend the time on that they might actually choose and pick up because the work is already as formal as they want it to be or as fleshed out as they want it to be.

The other thing is that if you have an editor look at something the first time around, and let's say you want to have another level of editing done—let's say you did developmental editing, now you want to do stylistic—because they've already looked at it once, they might have an easier time getting into it the second time around. Or some editors even will actually combine certain steps. So maybe let's say you're doing a stylistic edit with a copy edit. Now this I would be very careful about reviewing the contract details, the terms. Make sure you know what product you're getting because not everybody is going to necessarily put those two together, nor should they have to.

At the end of the day, good negotiating comes from a really genuine place. As an author, as an editor, you want to do right by people is sort of the best way of framing it. As an editor, I'm always looking to help the clients—we're here to serve you. And as an author, you want to be cognizant that you are getting what you really need out of the situation. And that you're not undermining anyone else's pricing, anybody else's services. We'd much rather you be up front about it and, again, come at this from a very open and transparent and genuine kind of place. Because maybe we're not the editor for you right now, but maybe you become a wildly successful author in the future, and you would like to work with us again, that would be brilliant.

So long as you do approach it carefully, and you approach it with sort of that other human being on the other end in mind, then you're not going to spoil any relationships—you're going to set yourself up for success, no matter what. And because this is such a big community driven industry, maybe we can help you out in other ways. You never know who you might run into in future.

With that, I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you have any questions on the topic discussed, or if you'd like to suggest a future topic, please don't hesitate to reach out. Contact me through elixereditorial.com or find me on Instagram, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn @elixireditorial.

Intro and outro modified from Danse Macabre by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com and licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License.

See you next time in The Laboratory.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.