I was happy to help a member with some hard numbers to present to her manager. And it was good to confirm that, at least on this point, the editorial sages are more or less in agreement.
She runs Dragonfly Editorial. How fast can you edit? If your footnotes have never been spell-checked, spell-check them. If your references are not standardized, fix them. You do not want to pay someone else to fix things you could easily have fixed yourself. Divide this figure by 4 pages an hour to arrive at the likely total cost of copyediting. Third, ask around to find out if anyone you know has worked with a good copyeditor. Or go directly to the Editorial Freelancers Association website. There, pick an academic copyeditor who is familiar with your field and its conventions.
I also recommend Mafoko Manuscript Services , run by my friend Dr. Mary S. Lederer, an excellent editor, and her colleague Dr. Leloba S. They are based in Botswana, so their rates are about half US rates. Once you have identified someone you want to work with, give the copyeditor clear instructions about what kind of edit you want.
There are four kinds of editing: technical editing, style editing, correlation editing, and substantive editing. Each one of these is described below. Substantive editing is the most time-consuming and also the most valuable. If you struggle with English grammar, I recommend asking a copyeditor for a technical edit and a substantive edit. If you are pretty confident about your grammar and spelling, you can ask for only a substantive edit. Finally, if you are having the copyeditor edit a book-length manuscript, have him or her edit one chapter and send it to you so you can review the changes before going farther.
If yours is a book with a lot of dialogue, you might feel you deserve to submit eleven pages instead of ten. Smaller type is the traditional scam for getting more words per page, but creative cheats find other ways. They might go for more lines per page by squishing the line spacing. Instead of proper double-spacing, like this,. A writer wanting to pad a skimpy manuscript can just as easily stretch the line or word spacing, increase the type size, and make the margins larger.
Instead of artificially padding or squashing your manuscript, examine your motives. Stop thinking about quantity, and inspect for quality. Is all that dialogue effective? Is there not enough action up front? Is your book too long or too short? They mainly just want to know if readers will keep reading. You can customize your status bar to keep a running count of pages and words among many other things. The count will change as you type. If you highlight a chunk of text with your cursor, it will show you the number of words you selected.
Maybe it takes, say, five times longer. That would mean editing about 12 pages per hour. Sounds good. Just read the page five times, and out pop the edits. Actually, that heuristic may hold true for a simple edit, but substantive editing takes more time - 15 to 60 minutes per page, some experts say. So, how long can editing take?
0コメント