Feeling the Pinch? Tips for making the most of your editing budget

The economy is tough right now. Groceries are expensive. Rent is expensive. If you’re an author with a book that needs editing, you may be wondering how you can fit that expense into your budget, and how to best use the money you do have to spend. Editing will never be cheap. It’s a time-consuming process that requires a lot of skill. But there are ways you can help bring that cost down and maximize your editing budget.

1)   Make sure you are ready for editing before hiring an editor: I sometimes hear from authors who are looking for an edit, but when I look at their manuscripts, it’s clear that they don’t have a handle on the basics of writing a book. Maybe they’re head-hopping between numerous characters or they have a poor grasp of proper grammar and punctuation. I can certainly help them with those issues, but the cost of an edit is going to be based on how long I estimate it will take. If I can see that I will have to spend a lot of time fixing basic errors or teaching an author the general mechanics of writing a book, I will charge more. If you are new to writing, you would probably be better served at this stage by reading lots of books on the craft of writing and getting feedback from a local writers group. This can show you where you need to improve and help guide your work at a much lower price point. I am not saying that you should hold off on hiring an editor until you’ve mastered the process. But learning as much as you can upfront so you are writing the best book you can at that time will help lower the cost of a future edit.

2)    Turn in the best manuscript you can: Many authors finish up their first draft and immediately send it off to an editor. While this can sometimes make sense if you are getting story-level editing and have no idea where to go from your first draft, it’s usually better to do a bit more work on it before hiring outside help. As I mentioned in #1, the length of the manuscript and the quality of the writing impact the cost of editing. If you can self-edit to cut extraneous words, paragraphs, and even scenes, that will cut your word count. If you run spell-check and reread the manuscript looking for errors, you’ll be providing a cleaner manuscript that will take less time to edit. If your second draft eliminates some of the bigger plot issues or strengthens your character development, that will leave less for an editor to do (and charge you for). Obviously, you won’t be turning in a perfect manuscript. If you could do that, you wouldn’t need an editor at all! Just make sure you’ve done all you can to strengthen the story first. When you’ve run out of ideas about how to further improve it on your own, that’s when you should hire an editor.

3)    Prioritize your editing needs: In an ideal world, all authors would get both story-level and prose-level editing. But if your budget is tight, that might not be possible for you. In that case, an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses can help you decide where best to put your hard-earned dollars. If you’ve gotten previous feedback that your stories are compelling but your prose needs a lot of smoothing, then spending your money on a line edit instead of a developmental edit might make sense. If you’ve been told you write beautifully but your plot was confusing or your main character was boring, then it might be best to get a manuscript evaluation and handle the sentence-level editing on your own. You should also take into consideration the other resources available to you. For example, if you have great beta readers who have successfully helped you shape previous stories, then maybe you can lean on them for free or low-cost story-level feedback and use your budget to pay for a line editor.

4)    Understand your goals for editing: Sometimes I’ll have clients hire me for a manuscript evaluation, but after I’ve given them my feedback on how to strengthen their story, they make only minor changes, saying they are happy with it as it is. That is certainly their prerogative—it’s their book, not mine—but if they knew from the start that they weren’t interested in doing significant rewriting, they wasted their money getting story-level feedback. That money would have been better spent on a line edit. While I think all authors could benefit from an outside opinion of their story mechanics (even best-selling authors have editors doing this work for them), if you know you don’t want to make any changes (whether because you think the story is doing exactly what it needs to do or you just don’t have the stamina for another rewrite), then don’t spend your editing budget on feedback you know you won’t

put to use.

In a perfect world, we’d all have enough money to pay for both story-level and sentence-level editing. But if that’s not the case, using these tips can help you decide what type of edit would best serve you and how you can provide the strongest manuscript possible for editing.

It’s that time of year when everyone is busy with holiday plans, so other goals, like scheduling an edit, tend to take a backseat. That means my editing calendar is a little more open this time of year. If you’re ready for an edit and don’t want to wait the two to three months that I usually schedule out, get in touch and we can get started quickly! If you schedule an edit to begin before the end of 2025, I’ll give you a 10% discount as a holiday gift.