Adjacent skills · Less obvious
Editing and manuscript assessment
Another writer's pages, your judgement, a fee that does not wait for publication day.
Developmental editing, line-editing, copy-editing, proofreading, and the lighter manuscript critique are separate trades, though writers often blur them on a website. The market is authors about to submit or self-publish, and the occasional publisher farmed-out overflow. You are paid to see the book that is not yet there, and to say so in a way the writer can use. It is skilled, tiring, and — priced properly — a stable pillar under a writing life.
- Typical pay
- From a few hundred for a critique letter, to a per-word or per-hour rate that, on a full manuscript, reaches the low thousands. Copy-editors and proofreaders in publishing have established (if pressured) rates; private clients will pay more for a name.
- Ceiling
- Solid ceiling
- Speed
- First money in weeks
- Effort
- A job in itself
- Needs
- Needs a name
How it works
- 01
A writer sends a manuscript and a brief. You quote against a sample, a deadline, and a defined level of work.
- 02
You deliver an editorial letter, a marked file, or both, according to what was sold.
- 03
They pay (ideally a deposit, then the balance on delivery). They may come back for the next draft.
How to start
- 01
Pick a level and a genre you can defend. 'I edit anything' is how you meet a 180,000-word space opera on Friday night.
- 02
A sample edit of a few pages is how you and the client find out whether you can stand each other.
- 03
Join a professional body if you are a copy-editor or proofreader. For developmental work, a publication record and a method will have to do.
Watch out
- 01
Scope: a 'quick look' that becomes a structural rebuild is how resentment is born. Quote the job you will do.
- 02
You are not the writer's agent. Introductions, if you make them, are a gift, not a service in the fee.
- 03
Deposits exist because manuscripts, like people, disappear.
I have spent decades on other people's pages — as a publisher, a script editor, a tutor. Editing is writing's cousin: same family, different inheritance. If you can do it, charge as a professional, not as a friend with a red pen. Friendship is how you end up doing a second pass for nothing.