Re:Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
by ggm on Sunday December 29, 2019 @03:02PM
(#21908077)
As the partner of a copy editor, I'm intrigued you think this is inexpensive, because she's been doing this for years for PhD and scientific papers, and the book she did took a lot longer and cost several thousand dollars at her below market rate. Admittedly it was for an english as a second language author, but my observation is that for a work of any significant length, copy editing is not cheap. For a self published book, it might exceed the revenue: you'd have to sell thousands of copies to recoup the copy edit cost.
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I guess I write fairly well; I'm a professional writer by most definitions. By copy editor I mean someone who mostly just fixes spelling and grammatical errors--and maybe flags stuff that doesn't make sense. When I hired a copy editor for a book, I paid a few hundred dollars to someone who had interned for a magazine editor friend of mine.
I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.
Well, I think you're right about needing a fresh pair of eyes. And, as a pro writer you probably made less mistakes than most.
You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.
A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...