Last time, I wrote a bit about work availability in the book production business. Today, it’s time for the rates question.

The question of how much to charge is often on new editorial freelancers’ minds. And I think we get into our fears about being rejected. We underbid and run into the same issues that happen when looking for a job and not asking what we are worth salary-wise. I don’t think that being job scared all the time will serve us in the long run as either employees or freelancers. Let’s look at this a different way.

The Value-and-Match Question

I prefer to look at rates as part of a value-and-match question for both the provider of a product or service and their client.

We can’t initially know for sure all of the motivations of a potential client (we are not them), so let’s begin with our side of the value-and-match: the freelancer in this case. What do you want from this gig? As an editor, you can get anywhere from $20 to $120US per hour (or less or more), depending on how potential clients see your value and what match relationships you create. I’m sure famous fantasy author, Neil Gaiman, pays his developmental editor an excellent rate: a) because he values her expertise very highly, b) because she values her expertise very highly, and c) because they are a good match for each other. As a result, she may not need many other clients in order to make a good living.

But you and I may not meet a famous (and prolific) author and become their go-to editor, and maybe you are just starting out in the field. Maybe you are the major/sole breadwinner in your family, or maybe you just want to create some supplemental income. You see, we all come from different places on the experience-expertise-compensation-need spectrum. So, comparing your rates to other folks is not particularly useful. There is a rather large range of actual hourly rates for publishing services, a large enough range that your needs can probably be met somewhere along the range.

Setting Standards, Setting Boundaries

The key to success is to know your value. You may start out a bit lower than some average hourly rate (I normally charge by the page or word and track my hourly to make sure that rate is working for me, so if I can go faster, I make more anyway, and the client has a fixed fee to budget for), but one key is to not be afraid to raise your rates as your expertise and reputation grow. And also to not be afraid to drop a client if they insist on remaining too cheap after you have moved on to better rates with others.

That’s been the pattern of my experience: finding returning clients willing to pay higher rates and letting go of early ones who want to pay the same rate they did twenty-five years ago (yep, it happens!). Those clients I’ve kept know my value and will pay a small premium for it. Letting go of the matches that don’t work for you can be just as important as getting that client match you’ve always been looking for. No point in wasting your time with a rate that won’t pay the bills.

Your client match (for content, personality and payment) is definitely out there. Go be irresistibly attractive with your excellent value as a publishing services provider, and they will find you.

We editors and proofreaders rarely use a literal red pencil anymore (although I do know some who still print out their text and put those cryptic proofreading marks all over it—I do agree that it’s still easier to see errors in print than on screen). I still get the definite impression, though, that writers of all kinds of materials still greet us with an air of apprehension and a glance to locate their author shield for easy access in case of the need for defense.

So Many Judgments!

The editorial/proofreading eye is designed to make judgments, so writers and web page designers tend to feel judged when we discover things they didn’t see. It’s all about finding mistakes, which are always a little embarrassing. I can see the desire to avoid confronting one’s mistakes, and also the tendency to think that the editor or proofreader is also judging you personally and thinking you’re a “bad” person because you didn’t catch all the mistakes. Not so, though. We’re evaluating the text, not you as a person. Really!

The Fresh Set of Eyes

I can’t speak for all editors and proofreaders, but I’ve talked to enough of them to know that, yes, we do take pride in seeing what others might miss. But we also tend to have someone else proofread our stuff. Every mind makes assumptions, especially about material we’ve seen over and over again. I would never claim that this blog is error free, for example. That fresh set of eyes can make all the difference.

Preferences

Lots of grammatical judgments in particularly have subjectivity written all over them. What works for one style of writing or one publishing house is forbidden with another. Just check out the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s filled with recommendations and preferences; less is set in stone than one would think. I have numerous style sheets for different clients to keep all their preferences straight. The main pattern we editors are often looking for is simple consistency for the benefit of the reader. You can stretch and even break “the rules” if you do it consciously and consistently. And one thing the editor can do for you is to make sure you are consistent within your own system (capitalization of important terms that are not normally capitalized comes to mind).

Flexibility in writing and editing is the way I like to work. It allows me to collaborate creatively with my writer and/or publisher to make for the best read for their audience. A scholarly book is not going to look like a stream-of-consciousness fiction. We have to be just as flexible as required for the folks we collaborate with.

So, contrary to “popular belief,” we proofreaders are not angry at mistakes or the ones who make them, nor are we out to puff up our egos by waving our “we’re right and you’re wrong” flags all over your story.

Seeking the Smooth Read

What do we really want? We just want to make the reader’s experience of a site or book or whatever, smooth and easy, and we want to avoid having that reader make negative judgments about the site and the person who’s offering the products or services based on some silly typo. These natural judgments that people make (that the person’s service lacks quality) are probably totally unjustified, but a little extra attention from a second set of eyes can be very valuable in projecting quality and gaining trust.

Yes, we and our “red pencil” really are your friend. The idea is to make your work the stuff people want to read.

There’s the scope fog for the job itself (conflicting scopes from different client representatives), and then there’s scope creep because of queries from me or long conversations on the phone to clarify what the client really needs.

Setting Boundaries

These client-match issues cause more trouble and eat up more time than any other project issue. I do set some boundaries on projects based on their content (don’t give me literary criticism books to index or doctorate-level engineering tomes—I will refer you!), but it can be harder to gauge how well I will “get along” with the client. And since that assessment can cost me, I need better tools to figure this out ahead of time.

Asking Questions to Understand the Client

Cue Chris Lema. Several years ago, I decided to keep this little gem from one of his daily blog posts, tucked it into a digital note, and forgot about it (stupid me!). I rediscovered it during a purge of my notes list and now it’s time to 1) integrate it into my practice and 2) customize it to my business. Chris’s original business was website design and functionality (if I remember correctly), so let’s start with his questions and then we can see how to apply them to my publishing services biz. Chris asked

—Do you feel comfortable talking about your budget?
—Do you understand that you can’t match your competitor’s site without matching their spend?
—What have you tried already?
—Are you prepared to help get things done?
—Do you work well with timelines and accountability?
—Can you articulate what success will look like?
—Are you the decision maker?
—Are your expectations realistic?
—What do you know about me?

Great questions for Chris’s clients when he’s talking with them about working together. I looked at his questions and realized that most of the time, I don’t ask hardly any of them to the authors I work with. Hmm. I got used to working with a handful of publishers whose needs and methods I got to know over time, so I could expect consistency. I stopped asking questions. But that was in the 1990s.

Since then, the publishing world has obviously changed just a bit (!). I deal much more with individual writers or individual scholarly authors these days. Schedules are much more unpredictable, and more of these folks don’t know the difference between developmental editing and copy editing and proofreading. And that’s OK. I’m the one who needs to ask the right questions for my purposes, as well as listening to theirs.

So, today, I stand committed to asking the following questions of new clients to create a better chance for a good match:

—What’s your book about?
—What are you looking to have me help you with?
—Interesting. May I see a sample chapter?
—What editing work have you done on your book so far?
—May I see a sample from the middle of your manuscript?
—What do you see as your role in the my editing/proofing/design process?
—What budget did you have set up for this part of your writing process
—What kind of turnaround time do you need for me to successfully support you?

So, there we are. Now to implement this set of questions with every.single.client.

How about you?