The Copyeditor's Desk

Mrs. Micah, over at Finance for a Freelance Life, offers an interesting rumination on setting fees for freelance writing and technical consulting. She starts at the premise that one will charge an hourly rate and then touches on some signal issues for writers: the question of what your time is really worth and the matter of estimating how much time and energy a project will demand.
written by vh for The Copyeditor’s Desk. © 2008
Meanwhile, at about the same time, veteran editor Katharine O’Moore Klopf posted an article at Editor Mom that touched obliquely on the subject as she made some suggestions for where to find experienced professional editors. Take note, here, of this important statement:

In general, you won’t find the most professional or experienced editorial professionals on Elance.com [or on other sites like it, such as Guru.com], because the way Elance is set up encourages freelancers to outbid one another, to the point of lowballing. Those rates may seem reasonable to you, but they’re starvation pay for freelancers. With the rates that most projects go for on Elance, you’ll often wind up with the inexperienced newbies and the less-talented freelancers whom few other people will hire. You’ll be paying Walmart prices and expecting to get Saks Fifth Avenue work, but guess what you’ll often get instead.

Most writers and editors underestimate the value of their time and skills. It takes real talent to write well. And a editor gets to be good through broad and deep education. Each of these characteristics—talent and education—are worth a great deal, and when they’re combined in one package, they’re worth even more. No one should work for less than a living wage (the federal minimum wage, which is not a living wage, is now pegged at $7.25 an hour).

I’d like to address two facets of this issue: first, how to estimate what you need to earn; and second, how to get it from clients who in fact do think they should pay Walmart prices for Saks Fifth Avenue work.

Valuing Your Time

The first order of business for a freelancer in any business is to figure out how much she or he needs to earn, per hour, to cover living expenses and overhead. To begin, you need to estimate how much net income you will need to keep a roof over your head and food on your table. Elsewhere, I have figured that I would need to net a bare minimum of about $27,800 to maintain a crimped version of my present lifestyle, were I laid off (my current net from a middle-income salary is a little over $39,570).

Starting from your projected net, you need to add the following expenses:

· Taxes (state and federal income taxes; property taxes; vehicle registration fees, etc.)
· Health insurance
· Retirement savings
· Membership in professional and trade organizations
· Computer equipment
· High-speed computer connection
· Office supplies
· Increased utility bills resulting from working at home
· Unreimbursed work-related travel
· Incorporation and other legal and accounting fees

The largest of these will be health insurance and taxes, and unfortunately, they are the two items you can’t omit from your calculations.

For me to net $27,800, I would have to gross about $34,760.

Once you have an idea of how much you want to gross, you need to translate that to a rough hourly rate.

Let’s suppose I put in 40 billable hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Forty hours times 50 weeks gives me 2,000 billable hours; dividing 2,000 hours into $34,760 gives me a rate of $17.38 an hour.

O.K. Now let’s get real: to get a freelance business going and keep it running, you need to sell, sell, sell. A good 40% of your time will be spent on marketing and networking. A far more likely figure for billable hours is something like 20 hours a week, or 1,000 hours a year. That is, to earn $34,760, you’ll need to charge $34.76 an hour.

That represents a very modest income. If you live in a big American city, it will buy a lifestyle best described as “ascetic.” You probably will have to reside in a small town to live comfortably on such an income, especially since you will experience periods when no work comes in. This means that realistically you need to charge a much higher per-hour rate.

I aim for $60 an hour, and I’ve had clients suggest that is too low. Others suggest it’s too high, often by fainting dead away when they hear it.

At $60 an hour, if I worked 20 hours a week and gave myself a two-week vacation, I would earn $60,00 a year. My freelance activities earn nothing of the sort, of course, largely because I don’t work anything like that many hours.

Making Your Charge Palatable to Clients

Few people will pay an English major $60 to an hour, not even one with a Ph.D. The first thing that pops into their minds is that they can’t afford it. Second thing they think is that your highest and best use is teaching high-school or grade-school English for around $24,000 a year, an amount that would net you something like $9.60 an hour on a gross of $12 an hour (figured on a 12-month basis, which is how long you have to make that nine-month pay last). They think, my dears, that you have got your nerve to ask for a living wage.

So, what you  need to do is present your fee in a way that does not readily make your hourly rate clear. How? Translate it to a per-page rate.

How to Calculate a Per-Page Rate

a. For writers

To achieve that and do it fairly for you and for your client, you need to know how long it will take you accomplish one page of work. As an editor, how long will it take you to edit a page of copy? Or, if you’re a writer, how long will it take to write a page?

Obviously, this varies according to the kind of assignment you’re presented with and according to experience and expertise.

I can write and revise a 1,600-word feature article for a magazine or newspaper in two to four hours. But the writing is the easy part: to gather the material to compose such an article, I have to do a lot of research and interview a half-dozen sources. Each of those sources has to be reached on the phone or in person; this generally requires getting past a gatekeeper and then waiting for the person to return a call. It may require going to the person and spending upwards of an hour in a face-to-face interview. Assuming, optimistically, that I spend about 40  minutes tracking down and interviewing each of six subjects, that’s another 4 hours of work time right there…before I locate printed material and read it. Let’s add another 4 hours, then, for reading articles, books, and online materials. A four-hour project has now morphed into a 12-hour project, and that’s a pretty modest estimate. In fact, it’s likely to take much longer.

All of which is to say a simple magazine assignment can be expected, conservatively, to take a day and a half of work time. At $60 an hour, I should get no less than $720. Sixteen hundred words amounts to about 6.4 pages of typed copy. So, dividing 1,600 words by 6.4 pages, I should get $112.50 a page for a simple, straightforward magazine article.

Now, here’s something many beginning writers don’t know: $720 is cheap for a professionally written magazine article. I wouldn’t touch a feature assignment for less than $1,000. It’s just not worth my time to do it for less. Believe me: it will take more than 12 hours to complete.

Why don’t beginning writers know that? Because editors charge what they think they can get away with, and what they can get away with is outrageous!

Why can editors get away with taking outrageous advantage of freelance writers? Because writers don’t know what their time is worth! And because you are competing with people who write for ego gratification, not to make a living. Editors know they can find people who will do the job for the sheer joy of seeing their byline in print, and who will think a $300 fee for a $1,000 job is just pure gravy.

This is why, if you simply must try to be a freelance journalist, you should join an organization such as the American Society of Journalists and Authors, where you can learn from other writers how much they are being paid and what is considered a reasonable rate for a professional job.

It is better, IMHO, to write for businesses, where the custom of paying for value received is more widely  honored than in journalism.

Writing is hard work. That is why my rate for ghost-writing or cowriting a book-length work is $60 a typed, double-spaced page or, for writers who already have a contract, 100% of the author’s advance (minimum $20,000) plus 50% of royalties. This is based on a track record that includes four books published with prominent national presses, one of which was a best-seller. Less experienced writers might charge less, but anything below $30 a page may not pay you for your time. You should get between $10,000 and $20,000 to ghostwrite a book; at $20 a page, a 350-page manuscript would gross a mere $7,000…for what could easily be six months to a year’s worth of full-time work.

In any event, rather than citing a per-hour rate that may scare a client off, consider the nature of the assignment, estimate how long it will take to perform the assignment, multiply that amount of time by your targeted hourly wage, and add 25 to 50 percent for Murphy’s Law. This figure is the amount you should ask the client to pay for a proposed project.

Don’t ever agree to do a writing project on spec. And remember: “pay on publication” often means “pay never.”

b. For Editors

Editing is less difficult, although to do it well requires broad experience and a good education. If anything, the skills required to edit copy are more complex than those needed to write copy, especially if the copy consists of workaday newspaper, magazine, or website content. However, because one usually doesn’t have to spend hours in research and interviews, the immediate job feels less challenging.

At The Copyeditor’s Desk, our fee schedule is based on the estimated time it takes to edit or proofread a standard double-spaced page depending on the difficulty of the copy. The amounts we quote average out to about $50 an hour, which should net the editor $25 to $30 an hour, leaving $20 to $25 an hour to cover overhead. As a practical matter, if you billed 20 hours a week, that would give you an annual gross income of $50,000, from which you would have to pay the extravagant cost of individual health insurance and self-employed FICA (double the amount of FICA you pay as a salaried employee). For anyone living in an American city, that represents a net that’s just in the middle-income range. Remember: your net is 50 to 60 percent of gross.

With this in mind, when a client approaches us, we ask to see ten to twenty pages of the project from more than one section of the copy. (Writers often will start out gangbusters but fade as they plod toward the end, and so material deeper in the document may be significantly harder to edit than the first few pages.) We then sit down and edit the sample copy, timing the process. From there we can extrapolate how difficult the material is and how long it will take us to read it. The harder the copy and the more time it will consume, the higher our per-page rate.

The Advantage of Charging Per Page or Per Project

Experience shows that when you cite an hourly rate to a client, the client is daunted by the uncertainty of how much the final bill will come to. What, really, does $15, $20, $30, $60 an hour mean? The client is right to worry about this.

Even if you give the person an hourly rate with a cap, you still present an ambiguous proposition. So, the client thinks, this project should cost me $850, but I could end up paying less than that? If this person charges the whole $850, do I know whether she really put in that many hours? Additionally, unless you’re dealing with highly paid professionals or business executives, most people don’t earn $60 an hour. Most people don’t even earn $40 an hour—that would be $80,000 a year. Because they don’t have to pay their own overhead—because their employer is paying for their office, matching their 401(k) contribution, and covering a large share of their health insurance premiums—they don’t recognize that what you’re asking is actually about what a person who earns $40,000 or $50,000 a year costs his or her employer. They register a $50- or $60-an-hour fee as exorbitant.

For that reason, a fee that has a predictable bottom line sounds more reasonable, even if it amounts to more than the person would pay if it were prorated out by the hour. So, when you ask for a per-page or per-project fee, you’re more likely to earn what you’re worth.

The following heartfelt desideratum comes from the Conference of Historical Journals. Although it was written for scholarly authors, writers of any stripe can profit from most of its advice (except for the passages on peer reviewing).

What Journal Editors Wish Authors Knew

Submitting a Manuscript

Know your journal. Acquaint yourself with the scope and limits of a journal’s subject field before you submit your manuscript.

Consult the submission procedures outlined in the latest copy of the journal.  If the editor requires three copies of a manuscript, send them.  Observe stated word or page limits.  Most editors will respond to telephone inquiries.  Many journals, on request, will provide guidelines for the preparation of manuscripts.

Look at the footnote form employed by the journal to which you are submitting your manuscript and model your notes accordingly.

Double space your entire manuscript, including text, block quotations, tables, and notes.

Use endnotes rather than footnotes.

Many historical journals practice double-blind peer review.  Authors should therefore take steps to preserve their anonymity.  The author’s name and affiliation should appear only on a separate title page.  Do not place your name on the first page of the manuscript or in the running heads.  Do not reveal your identity in the notes through the use of the first person (such as, “In my recent article in the Journal of American History, I concluded that this hypothesis was balderdash”).

Do not send your manuscript to more than one editor at a time.  Historical journals frown on simultaneous submissions.

If submitting illustrations with your essay, send photocopies, not original photographs or artwork.

Most historical journals do not accept material that has appeared in substantially the same form elsewhere or is about to do so.  In addition, some journals will not accept material that is available electronically, such as through posting on a LISTSERV or mounting on a Web page.  If in doubt about a journal’s policies, explain your circumstances to the editor.

Always include a cover letter in which you outline the substance and significance of your work.  What makes your research different from everyone else’s?  You should also identify anyone who has critiqued your manuscript.  If the editors know who has read the work, they will not have to waste time asking someone to comment on an essay only to have that person decline because he or she has already read it.

Include in your cover letter your full physical address, phone number, FAX number, and e-mail address.

If you want your materials returned to you, enclose sufficient postage.

Be patient.  The solicitation of qualified outside readers and the gathering of evaluations often takes two to three months and sometimes more.

After Acceptance

It is the author’s responsibility to obtain the necessary permissions to quote or cite copyrighted or manuscript materials or to reproduce illustrations.  As a courtesy, provide copies of the permission letters to the editor.

Tables are expensive to set, and some journals require authors who cannot provide camera-ready copy of their tables to pay for composition.  Clarify this point with your editor to prevent surprises.

Once a manuscript has been set in type, do not try to rewrite it.  Changes at this stage are very expensive.  Correct only errors in fact, grammar, usage, and spelling.

Reviewing Books

Most history journals do not accept unsolicited book reviews or requests by potential reviewers to review a particular title.

Always include the page numbers of quotations from the work under review and the title and page numbers from other works.  The reference will allow editors to check for accuracy even if the journal does not footnote reviews.

Be prompt.  The historical profession is a small one.  Authors and reviewers who are continually late get reputations among editors.

If for personal or professional reasons you cannot complete an assignment, return the review copy at the earliest possible date so that the editor may find another reviewer.  Remember that tenures and promotions are often affected by having one’s book reviewed.

If you decline an invitation to review, editors welcome suggestions for alternative reviewers.

Compiled for the Conference of Historical Journals by Sara B. Bearss, with the assistance of Roger D. Adelson, John C. Inscoe, Nelson D. Lankford, Michael McGiffert, Ann Gross, and John E. Selby

Simplest answer: Write nonfiction.

Yah, I know: you want to write the Great Novel of the Western World. You want people to read your poetry.

The GNotWW has already been written, and it probably can’t find a publisher. And everyone on the planet wants people to read their poetry…but they don’t want to read anyone else’s.

Publishing is a business. Publishers buy what readers will read. Just now readers are reading nonfiction and genre novels. Precious few genre novels will ever make GNotWW; it’s difficult to get one published (though less so than “mainstream” or literary novels); and when you do, you’ll be lucky if you earn 10 grand on the thing. Ten thousand dollars for a year’s worth of work is not worth the effort. Even if you can crank one in six months, that still gives you a grandiose gross income of $20,000 a year. You can’t live on that. Well, you can, but no one in her right mind would want to.

Nonfiction works have the advantage of being marketable without the aid of an agent. If you have a subject—any subject—that’s useful or interesting to a reasonably large coterie of readers, you can find a publisher on  your own. Or you may be able to self-publish and sell enough of them to make it worth your while. One guy who realized he could write about maintaining his RV discovered he could make a ton of money by marketing a book on that subject through Amazon.com.

Yah, I know: crass. But my dears, business is crass. And publishing is a business.

You can find subjects that make you feel less whorish than some. A friend of mine, for example, a high-school teacher who took up magazine writing as a hobby, wrote a book on how to help your teenager succeed in high school. It was a subject that was right under her  nose: when you write about something related to your job, you are an expert on it. And anything you write that will help people in their lives will sell.

Later she went on to write YA novels. Not GNotWWs, but at least she can say she’s a novelist now.

So, look around you. What do you know, what do you do, what can you share that can make someone else’s life better? There’s your first subject.

My second published book (the first was a rewrite of my dissertation) was a trade book for Columbia, The Essential Feature. It simply described what I did for a living (I was writing for magazines at the time). The target audience was the kind of person who takes community college courses in feature writing out of a desire to become a writer with a capital W. It was not designed for journalism majors, but for people with a laptop on the kitchen table.

You’re listening? Target your book tightly for a specific reader. Tell that person something that matters for him or her.

Visualize the person in your mind and address that reader. Do not write for yourself. Do not write about yourself, except insofar as some experience you’ve had can demonstrably be useful for the reader. Writing is not an ego trip. It’s a business.

Next: Organize your content efficiently and intelligently. With the reader in mind, present the subject in a way he or she can understand easily and access quickly. Map out a rough table of contents before you start writing. You can always change this as you go, but it will serve as a guideline to keep you going in the right general direction from the outset.

Write tight! Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Read it. Memorize it. Internalize it. Use it!!!!!

When you have a draft, revise and rewrite until you have clean copy that you feel confident actually will work for your target reader.

Edit your  manuscript. Produce clean, grammatically correct, double-spaced copy with correct spelling and consistent style throughout. Follow Chicago style for book manuscripts and Associated Press style for magazine and newspaper copy.

Find a publisher. We’re talking about books here: for periodicals, you must have a contract before you begin writing. Here’s how you find a publisher for a nonfiction book:

1. Go to the library and get a reference worked called Literary Marketplace (LMP). This book, the bible of the American book publishing industry, indexes publishers by the subjects that they publish. It also gives the names and addresses of the relevant editors.

2. Make a list of subject headings and genres relevant to the book you’re writing. For example, if you are writing a book on how to beat alcoholism, look up subjects such as “self-help,” “addiction,” “recovery,” “psychology,” and the like. If you’re writing on how to sew quilts, look up “crafts,” “interior design,” “fabric art,” and such.

3. Look up publishers that say they’re publishing in those subjects and genres. Carefully note down

a. the acquisitions editor’s name (look for titles such as “managing editor,” “nonfiction editor,” or anything that appears relevant to what you’re doing);
b. the person’s correct title;
c. the publisher’s complete address, including the zip code; and
d. the publisher’s telephone number, FAX, website URL, and e-mail address.

4. Double-check to be certain you have spelled all of these things right! The fastest way to put off an editor is to misspell his or her name. The second fastest way is to get the person’s title wrong.

5. Compile a list containing this information for ten or twelve publishers.

6. Write a proposal package (more about which below).

7. Write a cover letter to go with the proposal. Customize it for the first six publishers on your list (i.e., address it to the correct editor and adjust whatever you say in the first paragraph to target that publisher).

8. Mail out a half-dozen proposals at once. (Yah, I know: publishers hate that. Writers hate getting screwed, too.)

9. As each rejection comes in, send another proposal to the next publisher on your list. Always keep your proposal in circulation!

10. In the unlikely event that you go through the whole list without selling your book proposal, go back to the library compile a list of another dozen potential publishers, and repeat the process.

Sooner or later you will find someone who will publish your book. If you don’t, then it’s time to come up with some other subject.

What is a book proposal and how do you write it?

A nonfiction book proposal is simply a description of what you’re writing plus an argument for why it should be published. It consists of these elements:

1. a cover letter stating what the book is about, who will read it and why, what similar works are on the market, and who you are and why you are so eminently qualified to write it;

2. a table of contents;

3. a detailed outline of the book’s contents (i.e., what’s in each chapter); and

4. three sample chapters, or an introduction and two sample chapters.

As you can see, the beauty of this for the wretch who dreams of making a living as a writer is that you need not have completed the book before you present it to publishers. A proposal is just that: a proposal. Once you have a running head start on your  manuscript, you’re ready to start marketing it. If you’re even moderately successful, you should land at least a small advance that will help support you while you’re writing.

Unless you stumble upon a very hot topic, as a beginning writer you can’t expect much in the way of an advance. Once you have a couple of books in print, though, you should be able to command $10,000 or $20,000 for a salable proposal. Maybe.

If you want to earn any more than that—or sell future books to publishers—you’ll need to do most of the marketing yourself. That’s another story.

Just remember: Publishing isn’t art. Publishing is a business.

–vh

We just finished copyediting a manuscript that was freaking torture to read.

Why?

Not because the writing was so bad (well, it wasn’t great, but it could have been tolerable). The author turned an otherwise workable book manuscript into a horror show by infesting it with an unending series of word-processing quirks.

For reasons unknown to God nor Man, he set all the paragraphs hanging indent. Then, trying to fix that, he pushed the first lines flush with the indented lines by HITTING THE SPACE BAR. Over and over and over again. Where he wanted an indented first line, he hit the space bar a few more times. Where he wanted an indented block, he set the copy boldface.

Irrationally, he varied the fonts throughout the copy. Some of the stuff was set in Comic Sans! No, not heads & subheads: this would pop up in the middle of a paragraph.

And he had no clue about subheadings, and so he set them with zero consistency…at what appeared to be the same level, some were boldface, some were italic, some were bold-face run-in; some had line spaces before and after, some had no line spaces. Figuring out how to set the subheads turned into an endless, annoying guessing game.

If you are a writer, please: get smart about typing your manuscript. Even if you’re going through a vanity press—which this guy was doing—someone has to copyedit and typeset your golden words. Try not to make their lives miserable.

First, learn to use a word processor. If you don’t know how to use Word or WordPerfect and you don’t want to take the time to learn, hire a typist to prepare your manuscript.

Next, decide what the heads and subheads will look like and stick to it. Headings are organized by “levels”: Level A is the chapter heading. Level B is the highest level of subheading. Level C is the next level. And so on to infinity: these correspond roughly to what your copy would look like if it were outlined:

I. Level A
A. Level B
B. Level B
1. Level C
2. Level C
a. Level D
b. Level D

Each of these should have its own format.

Level A, a chapter heading, is typically flush left or centered, 14 points, roman (“regular” type), caps and lower-case.

This Is a Level A Head

Level B is commonly set boldface, 12 points (the same size as the body copy), caps and lower-case, flush left, one line space before and one line space after.

This Is a Level B Head

Level C is usually italic, 12 points, caps and lower-case, flush left, one line space before and one line space after. If your MS has no level D heads, then Level C heads may be set run-in: as the first line of the paragraph, set flush left.

This Is a Level C Head

Level D is usually italic, 12 points, sentence style, flush left, run-in to the paragraph.

This is a level D head. It is set run-in to the paragraph, like the first sentence of the graf only set in italic. It may or may not be a complete sentence, but all should be grammatically consistent. If one is a full sentence, they all should be full sentences.

All body copy should be set flush left, 12 points, sentence style, DOUBLE SPACED!!!!! No space between the paragraphs!

Hanging indents must be made with your word processor’s hanging indent function! Do not, do not, do NOT hit the return key at the end of each line and the tab key at the beginning of the next line! Writers who do this will spend eternity in Hell trying to learn the Devil’s Own Word Processing System.

In Word, go to the Format menu and scroll down to Paragraph. In the window that comes up, find the line that says “Special.” Click on the little down arrow next to that word and, in the tiny menu that comes up, select “hanging.” You can either highlight the typed copy you would like to set as hanging indent and apply this function retroactively, or you can select Format > paragraph > special > hanging before you start to type a passage. To stop the hanging indent, go back to Format > paragraph > special and select “None.”

Block indents are similarly NOT MADE by hitting the return key and the tab indent! Don’t even think of trying that stunt.

In Word, on your standard toolbar (at the top of the screen) you should see an icon (a tiny picture) that shows a little squiggly line of type, then a right-pointing arrow with two more little squiggly lines, and then another line below the arrow. This is the “increase indent” button. Click on this to make a whole paragraph indented. To undo it, find the similar icon with a left-pointing arrow. This is the “decrease indent” button. It will make an indented paragraph set flush left.

Again, you can highlight a passage you would like indented or simply turn the function on before you start to type material you would like to set as indented block and then turn it off when you’re done.

Use the same font throughout, and use a standard font! Restrain yourself from trying to be artsy-fartsy with your manuscript. Remember that the page size will be different from the 8 1/2 x 11-inch pages you are typing on, and so attempts to take a passage and “shape” it will be lost. The best you can do is suggest to the layout artist how you would like to see the passage (if, for example, it’s one of those poems where the bard tries to use line lengths to build an urn or some such). Do not expect that the printed version will look the same as your manuscript, and do not try to force it to do so. IMHO, the best choice of fonts, unless your publisher asks for 10-point Courier, is 12-point Times or Times New Roman.

Some writers and publishers like to use the Styles function. I personally do not care for this, because it can complicate on-screen copyediting, and I wish people would not use it.

So, the Rules:

1. Use a plain-vanilla font.
2. Double-space throughout.
3. Set body copy flush left, using either the indent first line function (Format > paragraph > special > first line) or the tab indent key to indicate the first line of each paragraph.
4. Use the word processor’s hanging indent function to create hanging paragraphs (Format > paragraph > special > hanging) and the block indent function to create block indent paragraphs for quotations and the like (“increase indent” and “decrease indent” buttons on toolbar).
5. Set subheads flush left, no indent.
6. Decide on formatting that will distinguish each level of subhead, and use it consistently.
7. Refrain from trying to create cute or artsy effects with the type. Leave that to the typesetter, please. Show the typesetter with a separate page demonstrating what you want, title the page something like “Graphic 1,” and mark the passage to be cutesified with a call-out: <COMP: please follow formatting shown on Graphic 1>.

This is not hard.

When authors approach us with their manuscripts, many are not sure what an editor actually does. We cannot magically force a major publisher to accept your work or convince the masses to drive to the nearest bookstore to purchase it. But, we can take your words and clean them, polish them, and give you new perspective.

In this way, an editor, at least a good one, will aid authors in finding their voices. This is done by ensuring consistency, clarity, and an honest opinion of the possibilty of finding an audience for a specific work. An editor thus works hand-in-hand with an author making suggestions and changes as the work evolves.

A proofreader, on the other hand, is a final set of eyes. A good proofreader is looking more for the ever-present mistakes that happen in the process of transforming an electronic file in to an actual physical object. This process lends to minor errors in spelling, a missed comma here or there, and the typical spacing issues. The proofreader does not communicate with the author (unless a major issue arises), and is employed instead by a publisher that needs a keen, sharp set of eyes.

So, whether you are in need of an editor or proofreader, or are looking to work as an editor or proofreader, be clear that there is a difference. Editing takes a great deal more time and effort, and is thus a more costly service for authors…although we here at The Copyeditor’s Desk believe an editor’s input is worth every penny.

-TM