So, How Much Am I Worth?

I recently wrote about rate charts and how I think it is a disservice to professional editors for an organization like the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) to publish such charts publicly (see “Business of Editing: The Quest for Rate Charts“). That got me wondering: How much am I worth as an editor?

In my essay, “The Makings of an Unprofessional Editor,” I discussed inflexibility as a key sign of an unprofessional editor. That essay, combined with the rate charts essay, got me wondering: If I am inflexible about my fees, am I on the road to unprofessionalism?

Why the sudden philosophical thinking? This morning (i.e., Saturday morning my designated/scheduled time to write my AAE essay) I had planned to write on a different topic, one I was struggling with, when my e-mail box started chiming — ding! ding! ding! ding! ding! — alerting me to five incoming emails. I glanced over to my inbox and there they were: five offers for (relatively) small editing jobs (range: 700 to 1500 manuscript pages).

(Those are small jobs for me. This past week, for example, I began working on a chapter that runs nearly 500 manuscript pages and has 1,827 references — not a single one of which was in the correct format/style for this book. [The book has more than 130 chapters.] That’s 219 pages of incorrect references. EditTools came to the rescue. The Wildcard macro let me reformat the author names and the cite information [year, volume, pages] in less than 15 minutes [see “The Business of Editing: Wildcarding for Dollars“]; the Journals macro took a bit longer, a little more than 3 hours, to correct all but a handful of references [see “The Business of Editing: Journals, References, & Dollars“]. The Journals macro took so long because the dataset contains more than 78,000 entries. I guesstimate that the two macros saved me about 25 hours of drudgery of removing periods from author names, reversing author names, etc.)

Each of the five jobs had problems. One, for example, was authored by a group of scientists who are not native English speakers/writers and it required a 14-day turnaround. Another required reformatting of hundreds of references in a 10-day schedule. A third required a “light” edit but had a 23-day schedule. And so it went.

The question I needed to answer for each project was: How much am I worth as an editor? (I can make the calculation because I know what my required effective hourly rate is. Not knowing that would make any calculation nothing more than a wild guess. To calculate your required effective hourly rate, see the “What to Charge” series.) Once I answered that question, I had to decide whether there was any flexibility in my worth. In other words, if I quote the client $5 per manuscript page and the client counters with $2 per page, do I stand firm or do I negotiate down? That’s really the rub, the “down.”

If I have decided I am worth $5 per page, but am willing to negotiate down to $3, am I really worth $5? Was I ever worth $5 if I am willing to accept $3. Of course, this is project specific because for one project I may only be worth $3 whereas for another project I may well be worth $5, but that doesn’t really distract from the idea that if I ask for $5 on a particular project and negotiate down to $3, perhaps I was never worth the $5 I originally asked for.

Some would respond that you are worth whatever the market will bear and you will accept, an amount that can change daily or even hourly. But that makes me a commodity, which is the effect of bidding. Besides, how smart is it to bid against one’s self, which is the problem with websites that ask you to bid on editing work. Do I really want to be seen as a commodity?

If I remain firm on my price — telling the client this is my nonnegotiable price for editing project X — does that move me down the road toward unprofessionalism? Or is unprofessionalism limited to editing, excluding pricing? Does price firmness send a message? If it does, is it a meaningful message in the sense that it will be recognized by the recipient and affect the recipient’s behavior?

In the end, I think firm pricing is the sign of professionalism rather than unprofessionalism. Editors fool themselves when they believe that negotiating downward has any positive side for them; it certainly does have a positive side for the client, but not for the editor.

If I was worth $5 a page initially, I will never be worth less than $5. My price reflects the demands of the client, my required effective hourly rate, my experience, my expertise, my skills. None of those things change downward between the time I give my price and the time of the client’s counteroffer.

So, how much am I worth as an editor? The answer depends on who is giving the answer. To the client whose book I helped transform into a gazillion-copy bestseller, I may be worth $200 an hour. To the packager who is used to hiring local editors for 50 cents an hour, I may be worth no more than $10 an hour. But none of these valuations matter if I haven’t a sense of what I am worth as an editor and if I don’t stand firm on that worth. I am always willing to charge more; I am  never willing to charge less.

Professional editors are able to provide professional-level service because they are adequately compensated. They earn enough that they can afford to occasionally not earn enough on a project. Adequate compensation ensures that the editor has the time to think and review; there is no need to speed up the editing process so that the editor can make room for the next project in hopes that the next project will mean better compensation.

Inadequate compensation is part of the problem of unprofessionalism. No matter how you slice the earnings pie, you still need to earn the whole pie to pay your living costs. The thinner the slices, the more of them you need to create a whole pie — the lower you see your worth, the lower you are willing to negotiate, the more projects you need to squeeze into the set amount of editing time to create the “whole pie.”

Lower worth also means less ability to say no, to turn work and clients away, which means less control over your own business. People give the advice that you should have so many months of savings so that you can manage through a dry spell or have the ability to say no to a project/client you don’t want. That is good advice, but only half of the advice needed. The other half is that you need to know your worth and not bid against yourself.

If a client’s only concern is cost, then the client is not really looking for skilled editing; the client is looking for the ability to say the project was edited, regardless of editing quality. There is often a penalty to pay for approaching a skilled craft like editing with that view. Of course, the benefit to me is that my worth goes up when I have to reedit poorly edited material.

Ultimately, the keys to the answer to the question “So, how much am I worth as an editor?” are these: knowing your required effective hourly rate; ignoring rate charts that provide no link to reality (because they fail to disclose the underlying data and/or fail to define terms) and that act as a brake on your earning ability; and refusing to bid against yourself by standing firm on your price (which assumes that you have an articulable basis for your price). This is a sign of a professional and successful editor.

What do you think?

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Related An American Editor essays:

• On the Basics: Dealing with the Perennial Question of Setting Rates for Our Work
• The Proofreader’s Corner: How Lucrative Are Your Editorial Clients Really? Keeping an Eye on Creeping Costs (Part I)
• The Proofreader’s Corner: How Lucrative Are Your Editorial Clients Really? Keeping an Eye on Creeping Costs (Part II)
• The Business of Editing: Discounting Rates
• The Business of Editing: Fee Negotiations (Part I)
• The Business of Editing: Fee Negotiations (Part II)
• The Business of Editing: Fee Negotiations (Part III)
• How Much Is That Editor in the Window?
• The Business of Editing: The Pride of Price
• The Business of Editing: Standing One’s Ground
• The Business of Editing: Why $10 Can’t Make It

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Lyonizing Word: Shifting Styles

Shifting Styles

by Jack Lyon

In its undying efforts to be “helpful,” Microsoft Word can cause no end of problems. Among the worst of these are what I call “shifting styles,” which can change the formatting of your document without your consent and sometimes without your knowledge. Yow! I know of five ways this can happen. Here’s how to identify and fix each one.

Automatically Update Document Styles

The Problem

You go through your document, fine-tuning its style formatting to the peak of perfection. Then you carefully save your document for posterity. A week later, you reopen your document. What the…? All of your styles have shifted back to their original formatting. You’ll have to do all of that work over again! And how can you be sure it will stick?

The Solution

1. Open the document.
2. Click the Developer tab. (If you don’t have such a tab, click File > Options > Customize Ribbon. In the big window on the right, put a check in the box labeled “Developer. Then click the OK button.)
3. Click the Document Template icon.
4. Remove that dadburned checkmark in the box labeled “Automatically update document styles.”
5. Resave your document.

The next time you open the document, your exquisite style formatting will remain intact.

So what’s the point of the “Automatically update document styles” feature? Well, let’s say that your boss just loves to tinker with the look of your company’s forms and stationery, mandating Helvetica one week and Comic Sans the next. If you turn on “Automatically update document styles” for every company document you create, changing the formatting is a snap. Just open the template on which the documents are based, modify the styles, and resave the template. The next time you open one of those documents, its styles will automatically update to match those of the template.

It’s a slick feature, as long as you know when — and when not — to use it.

Automatically Update Styles

The Problem

You’ve just opened a new document from a client, and you italicize the first paragraph, which is a short quotation introducing the chapter. But suddenly all of the chapter text is italicized. What in the world is going on?

You’ve just bumped into Word’s “Automatically update” feature for styles. (This feature affects only the styles in the current document, making it different from the “Automatically update document styles” feature discussed above.) If you don’t know about the “Automatically update” feature, you can spend hours trying to adjust formatting, only to have everything in sight messed up beyond belief.

The Solution

1. Click the Home tab.
2. In the Styles section of the Ribbon, right-click the style (such as Heading 1) applied to your text. (If you can’t see the style, click the little gray button under the Change Styles icon to open the Styles task pane.)
3. Click Modify.
4. Near the bottom right of the dialog, remove the checkmark from the box labeled “Automatically update.”
5. Click the “OK” button.

Now when you modify some formatting in your document, you’ll change only the local selection and not everything that’s formatted in the same style. But really, you should avoid using directly applied formatting anyway. Using paragraph and character styles is much more efficient — the True Way — and avoids a multitude of problems.

So what’s the point of the “Automatically update” feature? It allows you to modify styles without drilling down, down, down through multiple menus. Well hey, that’s good! It means you can change formatting directly, see the result immediately, and have the styles updated automatically to reflect that formatting. Pretty neat!

So here’s my recommendation:

• If you’re designing a document, use the “Automatically update” feature with a bunch of junk text to set your styles exactly the way you want them (be sure to select the whole paragraph before changing the format). Once you’ve got them set, turn off “Automatically update.” Then copy the styles to your real document, or save the junk document as a template that you attach to your real document.
• If you’re writing or editing a document, make sure the “Automatically update” feature is turned off.

Styles Based on Styles

The Problem

You’re working away, editing a client’s document, and decide to modify the Heading 1 style to use a Goudy typeface. Whoa! Now the Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles are in Goudy as well. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that your client has made the Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles “based on” the Heading 1 style. If you don’t know how this works, you’ll be scratching your head over the changing formats. If you do know how it works, you can use it to ensure consistent formatting throughout a document.

The Solution

If you don’t want your style to be based on another style, do this:

1. Click the Home tab.
2. In the Styles section of the Ribbon, right-click the style (such as Heading 1) applied to your text. (If you can’t see the style, click the little gray button under the Change Styles icon to open the Styles task pane.)
3. Click Modify.
4. In the “Style based on” dropdown list, select “no style” (the first option in the list).
5. Click the OK button.

Problem solved.

But not so fast. Actually, this feature can be quite useful, as long as you know what’s going on.

Let’s say you want all of your headings to be set in Baskerville. It’s true that you could go through and set Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5, Heading 6, Heading 7, Heading 8, and Heading 9 (whew!) all to use that font (in varying point sizes, say). But now what if you want to switch to Palatino? Do you really have to go through and modify all of those styles again? Not if you originally based them all on Heading 1. If you did that, all you have to do is change the font for Heading 1, and all of your other heading styles will change as well. Pretty neat! Here’s how to do it:

1. Click the Home tab.
2. In the Styles section of the Ribbon, right-click the style (such as Heading 2) applied to your text. (If you can’t see the style, click the little gray button under the Change Styles icon to open the Styles task pane.)
3. Click Modify.
4. In the “Style based on” dropdown list, click the style (Heading 1, for example) on which you want to base the current style.
5. Click the OK button.

Now, whenever you modify the “parent” style (Heading 1), the “child” style (Heading 2) will be modified automatically.

Please note, however, that any changes you make to the “child” style will override the attributes inherited from the “parent” style. For example, if Heading 1 is set to 18 points, you can still modify Heading 2 (based on Heading 1) as 14 points. If you do that, though, you may wonder how to get rid of the override if you need to. Here’s the secret: change the attribute in Heading 2 back to the way it’s set in Heading 1 (14 points back to 18 points). The “child” style will simply pick up its attributes from the “parent style” once again.

You can use this feature to set up whole families of styles that are based on a “parent” style. For example, you might want to set up a family of heading styles, a family of body text styles, and a family of list styles, and then store them all in a special template. Just be sure to use a naming convention that makes it easy to remember which styles are the “parents.” The easiest way to do this may be to use “1” to designate “parent” styles: Heading 1, Body Text 1, List 1, and so on. Then you can use other numbers (2, 3, 4) to indicate “child” styles.

AutoFormat Headings

The Problem

You’re typing along, and suddenly the short line you entered a couple of paragraphs earlier has turned big and bold. Who does it think it is, anyway? When you investigate, you discover that the line has somehow been formatted with Word’s Heading 1 style.

You’ve just discovered one of the wonders of Word’s AutoFormat feature, which should be firmly beaten into submission before it takes over your whole document.

The Solution

1. Click File > Options > Proofing.
2. Click the button labeled “AutoCorrect Options.”
3. Click the tab labeled “AutoFormat As You Type.”
4. Under “Apply as you type,” remove the check from the box labeled “Built-in Heading Styles.”
5. Click the OK button.
6. Click the next OK button.

Now if you type a line of text ending in a carriage return but without ending punctuation (which, by the way, seems to be the defining factor here), Word will no longer see it as a heading and will no longer try to format it as such.

Define Styles Based on Your Formatting

The Problem

As explained above, you’ve turned off the AutoFormat option to apply headings as you type, but you still get automatic formatting. If that’s the case, you may still have the last “AutoFormat As You Type” option turned on. It’s labeled “Define styles based on your formatting,” and Microsoft explains its function like this: “Create new paragraph styles based on the manual formatting you apply in your documents. You can apply these styles in your document to save time and to give your documents a consistent ‘look.’”

The idea that Word is creating new styles as I work just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The Solution

1. Click File > Options > Proofing.
2. Click the button labeled “AutoCorrect Options.”
3. Click the tab labeled “AutoFormat As You Type.”
4. Under “Apply as you type,” remove the check from the box labeled “Define styles based on your formatting.”
5. Click the OK button.
6. Click the next OK button.

Problem solved — no more proliferation of unwanted styles.

The whole issue with all of these problems is one of control. How much “help” do you want Microsoft Word to give you? If you’re editing, your answer may be “none,” because editors need to have complete control over what’s happening, and they can’t have Word introducing changes they may not even be aware of. When I’m editing, I disable all of these features. If you’ve been suffering from the madness of shifting styles, maybe you’ll want to do the same.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

The Proofreader’s Corner: The Power of the Portfolio

The Power of the Portfolio

by Louise Harnby

Including a portfolio of clients and completed projects on your editorial website is one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use. Why? Because it’s shows you can practice what you preach.

The introductory paragraph on the homepage of my website tells potential clients how many years’ experience I have, the editorial services I offer, the types of client for whom I work, the national editorial society of which I am an Advanced Professional Member, my primary training qualification, and the number of books that I’ve proofread to date. Other pages on my website tell the client what I can do for them – for example, proofreading onscreen or on paper; the subject specialisms I’m comfortable tackling; the different types of mark-up I can offer. So far, all well and good — but how do I prove it?

Can do versus have done…

The above information is, I believe, important and should be communicated to the client. But I don’t want just to focus my clients’ minds on what I can do; I also want them to know what I have done. That’s because what’s been done makes what could be done more believable. Inculcating a sense of trust and belief in a client is essential because each of us is competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of colleagues offering similar services. This is where the power of the portfolio comes in — it shows our customers that we are doers rather than just talkers. Anyone can set up an editorial business and write (or hire someone else to write) great copy that tells the customer what they want to hear. The portfolio takes things a step further, anchoring the message in a have-done practice-based, rather than could-do promise-based, framework.

But, oh, the clutter…

I’ll admit it, my portfolio web page is a dense beast. I made the decision to break it up across three pages in order to make information more accessible to potential clients: academic, fiction, and commercial non-fiction. But I’ve been in business since 2006 so, even with this remedial work, there’s still a lot of text. I’ve thought long and hard about this over the years, and on several occasions I’ve dabbled with the idea of decluttering, perhaps by offering a selected portfolio of completed projects. But then I’ll receive another request to proofread from a publisher, project manager, independent author or student, they’ll mention how impressive they found my portfolio, and I’ll put aside my urge to spring clean.

Some benefits of busyness…

1. If you’re wondering how much information to provide in your online portfolio, and you are worried that including almost everything will make the web page look too busy, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself whether you think they will be put off by your long list of completed projects, or whether it will generate a stronger belief that you can provide the solution to their problems precisely because you have shown you have done it before. I know this much: the people who’ve told me (gently) that my portfolio “might be a little on the heavy side” are not clients — they’re colleagues, friends, and my husband! All of their opinions are gratefully appreciated, but, alas, they’re not the ones hiring me, and they’re not the ones hiring you!
2. An extensive portfolio, though busy, provides you with rich key words that may help make you discoverable and interesting to potential clients. I don’t believe it hurts me to have a long list of completed proofreading projects on my website that include author names like David Silverman, Jürgen Habermas, Mary Kaldor, China Miéville, and James Herbert, but that’s because I want to work for people who want proofreaders comfortable working in the fields of qualitative research, critical theory, international relations, speculative fiction and horror, respectively. Neither do I think it hurts me to have a long list of completed proofreading projects on my website that include titles such as Criminology and Social Policy; Ethics and War; Globalization Theory; The Transgender Phenomenon; A Visit from the Goon Squad; Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in Iraq; and The Mammoth Book of New Erotic Photography. These are more than titles; they include key words that may be used in long-tail searches (lengthier, more specific search terms) by my potential clients.

When considering your online portfolio, think about what these titles and author names tell your customer about what you have already done for other clients. Then consider how this affects their perception of what you can do for them.

Use navigation tools

You can include an extensive portfolio on your website without making your client want to gnaw off their own arm in a bid to navigate the information.

• Consider separating the information into sections by genre, subject area, or the particular type of editorial service you provided.
• Use multiple pages if you think this will add clarity.
• Jump-to code is an excellent way of reducing the amount of scrolling the reader needs to do in order to move up and down a long web page (see how I managed this in “Website Tips for Editorial Pros: Using Jump-to Instructions” on my blog, Proofreader’s Parlour — I was surprised by how easy it was to incorporate into my website even though I’m not a techie!).

Test it!

Nothing is set in stone when it comes to any aspect of marketing your editorial business. If you’re nervous about what and how much information to include in your online portfolio, test different options: full portfolio of all works completed; selected works only; short summary including only a few key works. Keep an eye on your visitor stats (using tools such as Google Analytics or StatCounter), and do comparisons in six-month blocks to see who’s looking at which pages on your site. You may be surprised. Analysis of my own website stats (excluding my blog) in 2014 showed that my online portfolio represented 20% of all page views — second only to my home page.

Nailing the job before you’ve even quoted

If your client hasn’t seen your portfolio, the quotation stage can be trickier because you have to do all your selling at the same time as you’re discussing money. However, a strong portfolio that engenders trust and belief in a potential client before they’ve started talking to you means you’ve done a chunk of the hard selling work ahead of time. They can already see that you’re fit for purpose because of what you’ve already done. This instills in them a sense of professionalism that will be front of mind when it comes to direct contact.

In other words, a strong portfolio puts the value you are offering on the table ahead of the money that will have to leave the client’s pocket; the focus is, first and foremost, on benefit rather than cost.

What if I haven’t completed much work?

If you’re at the beginning of your professional editorial career, you probably won’t have an extensive portfolio. Be creative:

• Consider using a narrative format that discusses the projects you have worked on in more detail, and how you delivered solutions to your client’s problems.
• Expand your portfolio page to include testimonials from your smaller list of satisfied clients.
• Include (with permission) a list of clients for whom you’ve worked.
• Update your portfolio every time you complete a new project so that the list is always expanding.
• Provide online samples (they can be made up) that demonstrate what you do when you are proofreading, copy-editing, or indexing. This shows you in a practice-based, rather than a promise-based, framework — these samples are things you’ve already done, not things you could do in the future.

Summing up

• If you don’t yet have an online portfolio, get cracking and build one!
• Tell the client what you have done as well as what you can do.
• Focus on practice, not just promise.
• Think of your portfolio in terms of what it tells people you want to hire you – your target customers — rather than your friends and colleagues.
• Don’t over-fret about clutter — it’s about the quality of the information, and what it tells the client about your proven ability to solve their problems.
• Consider the information you incorporate into your portfolio in terms of key word searches — that is, how it might help clients to find you.
• Use navigation tools (including embedded code) to help your customer move around a busy portfolio web page.
• Track page views to your site and test different portfolio styles to see what format you’re most comfortable with in terms of making yourself interesting to a customer.
• Use your portfolio to put the value you offer ahead of the fee you charge.
• Be creative if your portfolio is still in the early-growth stage.

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and the curator of The Proofreader’s Parlour. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, follow her on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or find her on LinkedIn. She is the author of Business Planning for Editorial Freelancers and Marketing Your Editing & Proofreading Business.

On the Basics: Dealing with the Perennial Question of Setting Rates for Our Work

Dealing with the Perennial Question
of Setting Rates for Our Work

by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

Whether you’re a writer, an editor, or any other publishing professional, coming up with rates for your work is a constant challenge. We’ve talked about this before and we’ll be talking about it throughout this millennium and into the next one, but it’s always worth discussing, simply because it is a constant concern. Even established writers and editors have to struggle with this challenge, thanks to the continually evolving world of online communications, bidding websites or services, efforts by professional associations, self-publishing, newcomers to the trade, and more.

How to Charge

Publications usually pay for writing by the word and, equally usually, those rates are determined by the editor or publication. There rarely is much room to negotiate, but you might be able to push up a rate by demonstrating expertise on a given topic, general experience and a publishing history, and good old chutzpah. Some publications will increase the pay rate as you become more known and valuable to them, starting you out at the low end until they know you’ll produce the quality they need and meet the deadlines they set, and raising your rate as the relationship continues.

Some writers will accept a lower per-word rate than usual in return for a guarantee of ongoing assignments from a publication. Certainty can be a big factor in negotiating rates.

It also can be possible to justify a low per-word rate by how quickly you can wrap up an assignment. You might usually get $1 a word for magazine assignments, but really want to write up a certain topic or get into the pages of a certain magazine that doesn’t pay that rate. If you can dash off a 1,500-word article at 15 cents a word, research included, in an hour, you just made $225 for that hour. If it takes two hours, that’s still more than $100 an hour. That per-word amount is ridiculously low, but the assignment or project rate is quite respectable.

It gets more complicated for editing work. As you may recall from other discussions here about rates, editors (and proofreaders) might be paid by the word, page, hour, or project. Even by the character.

Keep in mind, by the way, that charging by the hour could work against you as you become faster and more proficient or efficient — the faster you do the work, the fewer hours you work, the less money you earn. By charging by the character, word, or page, you can increase income as you increase proficiency and speed because you get more done every hour. If you charge by the hour, you actually lose money by working faster and more efficiently, because you have fewer hours to charge for. More hours to spend on other projects, of course, but not more profit from any individual project.

As Rich Adin has discussed in a previous post (see Business of Editing: The Quest for Rate Charts), membership organizations like the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) provide some publicly available guidance on rates based on what some of their members report, but those resources can be as problematic as they are helpful. There’s nothing wrong with sharing them with clients who haven’t worked with writers or editors before, but they shouldn’t be treated as the only option or as mandatory. Quote them with clients who offer rates that are lower than you accept if they support your preferences, and feel free to point out that they’re only guidelines when you want to charge more than such a chart shows, even at its higher ends of ranges. See below for some suggestions on “defending” the rates you want to charge.

Some organizations — the Editors Association of Canada is one — provide member-only rates information. That’s helpful in setting fees while reducing the number of prospective clients who might say things like, “But the EFA/EAC/whatever chart says this kind of work should only pay $X/hour, so why do you want me to pay you $X-times-2?” but it doesn’t help educate clients who try to pay ridiculously low rates.

Defending What You Charge

Once you figure out what you think you should charge, be prepared to defend that decision with some clients.

There will always be clients who try to bargain us down to lower rates for our work. You may have to explain the value that you bring to the client’s project — your years of training and experience, your skill level, your subject knowledge if appropriate; in short, why you’re worth what you charge. Not defensively, but from a position of confidence in that worth.

I tell prospective clients that my rates are based on my skills, experience, speed, and wide-ranging knowledge base. I don’t mention my need to pay my bills and cover my expenses; it’s too easy to let such “defenses” look whiny and unbusiness-like. I focus on why I’m a great match for that project or client. If that doesn’t work, I let it go. Life is too short to spend time on haggling over pay rates.

Sometimes you have to brace yourself to stand tough and tall about your rates. You probably will encounter prospective clients who say they can find someone less expensive. Fine. Don’t let them bully you into cutting your rate. Clients who try to bargain you down to less than you think you should be paid are likely to be headaches on other aspects of working together, including getting paid at all. Wish them luck, tell them you may still be available if the less-expensive options don’t work out — and consider increasing your quoted rate if they do come back to you because the cheaper editor turned out to be less than stellar at doing the actual work. (For another perspective, see Business of Editing: “I Can Get It Cheaper!”)

Of course, it’s always easier to hold the line on rates if you aren’t desperate for work. That’s why it helps to maintain a savings cushion, if at all possible, because when we’re desperate, we cave.

To Post or Not to Post

A tangent to the vexing question of what, how much, and how to charge is whether to publicize your rates once you decide what they should be.

The advantage of posting your rates at your website or creating a rate card that you can send to prospective clients is that the information is up and visible, and “tire-kickers” won’t bother you if your rates are too high for them. The disadvantage is that some clients who might be worth working for won’t contact you for the same reason, and some who would pay more than you expect will only offer what you post. By posting your rates, you lose your flexibility and ability to negotiate.

Many of us prefer not to post our rates because we like the option of negotiating payment client by client, even if doing so might involve more work each time. That’s certainly my preference. By not posting my rates, I can charge what I think a project is worth — or my time and skills for that project. I can charge some clients more and some clients less, depending on the nature of project or the client. I can benefit from a client with deep pockets and negotiate with one on a more limited budget.

Pressure to reduce our fees won’t go away. Neither will competition from newcomers, or clients with lowball rates, or websites where you bid for projects and are hired based on how little money you’ll accept. Beyond figuring out what we need to comfortably cover our expenses and administrative costs, as Rich Adin has often proposed (see, e.g., Business of Editing: What to Charge), we have to decide on our value and stand up for it.

Here’s to success in getting paid what you need and think you’re worth!

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is an award-winning freelance writer, editor, proofreader, desktop publisher, and speaker whose motto is “I can write about anything!”® She is also the owner of Communication Central, author of the Freelance Basics blog for the Society for Technical Communication, and a regular contributor to An American Editor.

Related An American Editor  essays:

• On the Basics: Questions to Ask for the Ideal Client–Freelancer “Marriage”

On Today’s Bookshelf (XXI)

My acquisition of new titles to read never ends. I keep thinking I need to stop and put the money I spend on books into my retirement account. But books have a special allure and I find nothing is as relaxing as sitting in my recliner reading a well-written and well-edited book (and nothing as frustrating as starting a poorly written or edited book :)).

Here is a list of some of the hardcovers and ebooks that I am reading or acquired and added to my to-be-read pile since the last On Today’s Bookshelf post, including some children’s books:

Nonfiction –

• The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmo
• Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass: Treachery, Torture, Murder and Massacre – France 1944 by Douglas Boyd
• The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
• The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV by Anne Somerset
• Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset
• Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips
• The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips
• The Lady in Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal, and Divorce by Hallie Rubenhold
• The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, and To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne (trilogy)
• Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman
• Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire by Robin Waterfield
• The Bolter by Frances Osborne
• Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn
• Dickens’s England: Life in Victorian Times by R.E. Pritchard
• The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince by Jane Ridley
• Saint-Exupéry: A Biography by Stacy Schiff
• The Black Death in London by Barney Sloane
• The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain by Alan Stewart
• Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford
• A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier: Phebe Tucker Cunningham by Robert N. Thompson
• Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results That Shaped America by Tony Williams
• American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit by Paula Uruburu
• Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich
• 1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies

Fiction –

• Twist by Dannika Dark
• The Clockwork Dagger: A Novel by Beth Cato
• Fatal Enquiry, Some Danger Involved, and The Black Hand by Will Thomas (3 books)
• The Sword Dancer Series (Sword Dancer, Sword Singer, Sword Maker, Sword Breaker, Sword Born, Sword Sworn, and Sword Bound) by Jennifer Roberson (7 books)
• Forbidden, Mortal, and Sovereign by Ted Dekker (trilogy)
• The Legend of Eli Monpress series (The Spirit Eater, The Spirit Rebellion, The Spirit Thief, The Spirit War, and Spirit’s End) by Rachel Aaron (5 books)
• Lady of Devices by Shelley Adina
• Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen
• Dead Like You and Dead Man’s Footsteps by Peter James (2 books)
• Snow Wolf by Glenn Meade

Children’s Books –

Now that I have grandchildren, I try to keep an eye out for good books for them, both for now and for the future. A series I have been buying for them and that I highly recommend is Brad Meltzer’s “I am …” series. So far the titles are:

• I am Albert Einstein
• I am Rosa Parks
• I am Amelia Earhart
• I am Abraham Lincoln
• I am Jackie Robinson
• I am Lucille Ball
• I am Helen Keller

Other children’s books that I have bought/preordered include:

• Find King Henry’s Treasure: Touch the Art by Julie Appel & Amy Guglielmo
• Crankee Doodle by Tom Angelberger
• Time for a Bath by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page
• The Princess and the Peas and Carrots by Harriet Ziefert
• Backstage Cat by Harriet Ziefert
• Sir Scallywag and the Golden Underpants by Giles Andreae & Korky Paul
• The Chandeliers: The World-Famous Giraffe Family Appearing Tonight and Every Night! by Vincent X. Kirsch
• Look! Seeing the Light in Art by Gillian Wolfe
• This Book Is a Planetarium: And Other Extraordinary Pop-Up Contraptions by Kelli Anderson

It’s never too early to start children on the path to literacy, so building a children’s library makes sense to me. Besides, there is great joy in having a grandchild sit on my lap and “read” along with me. Just as books are an adventure for me, so books are an adventure for children. Certainly much better than staring at a TV or computer screen.

For previous listings of books I’ve acquired, see previous On Today’s Bookshelf essays.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Thinking Fiction: The Style Sheets — Part IV: Timeline

The Style Sheets — Part IV: Timeline

by Amy J. Schneider

In this final installment on the style sheets I keep while copyediting fiction, I discuss the timeline. Just as with character and location descriptions, the timeline must be kept consistent with the fictional world of the story, and sometimes also with actual events in the real world. I’ve found that authors often have difficulty maintaining a consistent timeline. Good thing I’ve got their back! Let’s look at one way to keep the timeline on track.

The Layout

I don’t often see timelines created by others, whether created by the copyeditor of a previous book in a series or provided by the author. When I do, it is often in a straight text format: paragraphs beginning with “Day One” or “Monday, September 3.” Occasionally it’s more of a plot outline, by chapter.

I’m more of a visual thinker when it comes to time and calendars, so I lay out my timeline as a Word table that’s set up like a monthly calendar. It has a header row with the days of the week, and the weeks extend for as long as the story lasts. This makes it much easier for me to spot when, for example, a school day falls on a weekend or we have only two weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Details to Track

So what kinds of details go on the timeline? Any references to time, whether specific or relative. Occasionally the author helps me out by including time indicators as heads in the text: “Friday night” or “March 26.” Great! On the timeline they go. Each item is preceded by the number of the chapter in which it falls (because in electronic editing, pagination may change depending on the user’s settings).

Occasionally the story may hinge on real historical events. Check those dates! Query if there are mentions of the day of the week that do not align with the actual dates. An online perpetual calendar such as the one at timeanddate.com can be helpful. Some calendars also include holidays. Some authors may not care whether their historical events, especially very old ones, align with the actual calendar for that date. But query any discrepancies anyway and let the author decide what to do.

Time references are often vague, and specific times or days of the week are not mentioned. In such cases, I simply note the reference and take my best guess as to where to place it in the table. “A few days later” might be two or three days. You can use other clues, such as whether it’s a weekday (judging by school days or business hours) or references to “later this week” and the like. Occasionally you may need to shift days around to better fit the calendar, and this can often help show you whether the timeline is accurate. If you have days that are not specific (for example, a day that is listed under Tuesday may not be specifically identified as Tuesday in the text), include a note to that effect at the top of the table. The phrasing I usually use is “Days of the week are indeterminate, except as noted.”

I haven’t yet run into a fictional setting where names of days or months are made up, or are divided differently than in the real world (for example, nine-day weeks and twenty-five-day months), but I did recently edit a novel that divided the day into an unusual number of hours in which each hour of the day had a name. Those divisions went on the general style sheet as well as on the timeline, where mentioned.

The following are some examples of specific things to track:

• As mentioned earlier, any reference to time, whether fixed or relative: midmorning; three weeks later; Wednesday
• References to weather, moon phases, sun position, seasons: the setting sun, a crescent moon, it rained all morning, a cool spring evening
• School days, workdays, church services: Make sure the kids aren’t going to school on Sunday. This is where tracking relative mentions of time comes in. If a scene specifically takes place on a Thursday, and then three days later Joanie gets in trouble at school, that should raise a red flag. Similarly, I once queried whether New York City has a morning rush hour on Sundays. And if a person who works a nine-to-five job is in the office along with all of her coworkers on a Saturday afternoon, business as usual, that’s a good time to query as well.
• Critical plot events: Tracking the day on which an important event happens will give you something to refer to later on: “Three weeks after the accident…”
• Character ages, birthdays, and other life events: If Linda was 26 at the beginning of the story, in May, then she can’t be 29 the following spring.
• Watch for “missing” holidays and big events (such as milestone birthdays), if their absence is remarkable. In a military thriller, a character may not be concerned about celebrating his 50th birthday, but in a homey country-themed romance novel, it would be unusual for the Christmas season to pass without comment.

Pay attention to logical inconsistencies relating to the passage of time. In a Civil War novel, I queried the author when a group of soldiers took more than a month to march 100 miles. That’s less than 3 miles a day, which seems unusually slow. In another story, a person left his room at eight p.m.; “the hours passed”; and then it was nine p.m. Either it’s later now, or less time than “hours” has passed. An event that was in the timeline three months ago would likely not be referred to as “the other day.”

I use a short horizontal line within days to indicate scene breaks. This helps if for some reason a scene needs to be moved or if there is a question about when exactly an event happened, if the description is vague.

Sometimes you may be able to fix timeline discrepancies by adjusting vague references (the author might have written “three weeks later” when it’s really two weeks, and making that change does not disrupt other elements) and writing a query to explain the reason for the change and ask the author if the edit is OK. Similarly, sometimes you can simply change “Thursday” to “Friday” and query. But you must be absolutely certain that you are not introducing another error. In other cases, the problem may be just too convoluted for a simple fix. In that case, write a query outlining the problem, make any suggestions that you can, and leave it to the author to fix (or not, if that is the author’s choice).

Nonlinear Time

Occasionally a story has characters moving in parallel timelines. Perhaps they have separated and are journeying in different directions (or are moving toward each other). Recently I edited a novel with parallel timelines (in alternating chapters): the odd-numbered chapters were about a person who was lost, and the even-numbered chapters were about the people who were looking for him. These can get tricky, but I simply do my best to align the days to keep events straight. In one novel, on the day when two timelines were supposed to join together again, they were actually several weeks apart. Query! Here, again, a note at the top of the timeline is needed to indicate that things may be fuzzy.

Similarly, some stories have flashbacks or otherwise jump around. Usually I separate these with a horizontal dividing line across the entire table and perhaps a line or two of explanatory text.

Conclusion

It may take some practice and experience to tune your ear to the sometimes vague and subtle references to time while copyediting a work of fiction. But your authors will thank you for it!

I hope you’ve gleaned some useful information from these articles over the past several months. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. Beginning in May, Thinking Fiction is being taken over by Carolyn Haley; I’ve worked with Carolyn and I know the topic will be in good hands. Meanwhile, I plan to continue my own discussion of fiction copyediting in my own blog later this year. If you’d like to read more, follow me on social media and watch for upcoming announcements. Finally, I thank Rich Adin for getting me to dip my toe into the blogosphere.

Amy J. Schneider (amy@featherschneider.com), owner of Featherschneider Editorial Services, has been a freelance copyeditor and proofreader of fiction and nonfiction books since 1995. She has shared her insights on copyediting fiction as a speaker at the Communication Central conferences, in writing for the Copyediting newsletter, and in an audioconference for Copyediting.com. Amy can be reached at LinkedIn, via Twitter, and on Facebook.

Related An American Editor essays:

• Thinking Fiction: The Style Sheets — Part III: Locations
• Thinking Fiction: The Style Sheets — Part II: Characters
• Thinking Fiction: The Style Sheets — Part I: General Style

The Business of Editing: Coding for Profit

When I edit a manuscript, I always edit in Microsoft Word. I do so because I have all sorts of tools available to me that make the editing process go more quickly and accurately, and thus more profitably. I edit in Word even if my client will have the manuscript typeset in Adobe InDesign because Word is better designed for editing than is InDesign.

Consequently, my work requires that I either insert codes in the manuscript that tell the typesetter/compositor how material should be designed (typeset) or I apply styles for the same purpose. Inserting codes can be a time-consuming process. Each element of a manuscript has to be coded and each code has to be typed precisely. For example, the code for a B-level head that immediately follows an A-level head might be <H2_after_H1> and each time it is required, it needs to be typed correctly. In addition, I am often required to properly capitalize the head. All of this information is contained in the design I am provided.

Some editors get lucky and do not have to both code (style) and edit a manuscript, but most editors I speak with do have to do both. The question is how can I make this a quick-and-easy process so that it doesn’t dramatically affect my effective hourly rate (EHR) and my profit.

The answer is EditTools’ Code Inserter and Style Inserter macros. They work similarly, except that Style Inserter applies styles from a template and Code Inserter types the codes into the manuscript. (A description of how Style Inserter works can be found at the EditTools website.)

Code Inserter is found on the EditTools Toolbar. It consists of two parts: the Code Inserter macro (#1) and the Code Inserter Manager (#2). (Click on an image to enlarge it for easier viewing.)

Code Inserter Macro & Manager

When I receive a project, I receive a design that tells me how to various elements of the manuscript are to be coded. For example:

Design showing codes & capitalization

Each of the numbered items in the above image show an element and the code to be applied to the element as well as the capitalization for the element.

The first thing I do is make use of the Manager for Code Inserter. It is through the Manager that I can create the Code Inserter macro.

Code Inserter Manager

The above image shows a sample code inserter file. I can either create a new file or open an existing file (#1). Because many books use either the same or a very similar design, I can create a “template” file that I can open and then just make minor modifications to the codes. Also, because I can save these files, when it comes time to do the next edition, I am ready to go if the design is the same or similar. If I choose to create a new file, the Manager opens but is empty.

In the design above, note that the A-level head is all capitals and is coded H1. I set the code inside angle brackets as <H1> to set the code apart from what might appear in the text. I type a name for the code in the Name (#2) field, which name appears in the main field (#3). I could name code anything I want. A good example is – Text No Indent, which appears at the very top of the main field (#3). How I name a code is important when we run the Code Inserter macro. In the Code field (#4), I enter the code exactly as I want it to appear in the manuscript. In this case, I typed <H1>, which appears in the main field (#5).

I also can tell the macro where I want the code to appear when typed in the manuscript (#6): at the beginning of the line (At Start), at the cursor’s location (At Cursor), or at the end of the line (At End). This instruction is reflected in the main field (#7). But also noteworthy are the other options listed below #6, particularly Include End Code. If I were to check this box, after inserting the beginning code, the macro would ask me to move to the location for the end code, where it would automatically insert the proper end code.

At the same time that the macro inserts the code in the manuscript, it can also do some formatting. The formatting options are listed at #8 and appear in the main field at #9. Note that at the bottom of the main field, the H3 and the H3 after H2 codes are formatted italic (per client’s instructions). The other option is to set the head casing (#10 and 11). This part of the macro applies the information contained in Casing Manager found under the Casing menu on the Ribbon.

The final steps are to Add or Update the entry (#12) and to Save or Save & Close (#14) the Manager file. With the Setup Hotkey (#13), I can assign a hotkey to the Code Inserter macro (not to the Manager). That is handy if you prefer to have the macro open and close as needed rather than remain open while you work.

Once I have finished setting up the Code Inserter macro’s codes, it is time to turn to the manuscript. Once I have setup the coding in the manager, unless I need to make changes, I no longer will access the Manager, just the macro. The manuscript is code free, waiting for me to change it.

Manuscript without coding

Some editors like to precode a manuscript, that is, code it before doing any editing; some like to code as they edit. I am in the code-as-they-edit group. I find it easier to determine what an element is based on what I have edited. For example, in the manuscript above, is the head an A-level head or a B-level head? I know from having edited the preceding material that it is an A-level head.

The Code Inserter macro presents a dialog that reflects all of the names you have assigned the various codes in alphabetical order. Note the location of – Text No Indent (#2) in the dialog below.

The Code Inserter Macro

Code Inserter gives you the option of keeping the dialog open while you edit (#1). It is the default; however, if you uncheck the option, that will become the default for the next time you open the macro. Unchecking the keep open option means each time you need to enter a code, you need to open the dialog, either by clicking on Code Inserter in the EditTools Ribbon (see #1 in the Ribbon image at the beginning of this essay) or by having assigned the macro a hotkey (see #13 in the Code Inserter Manager above). Because I use multiple monitors, I keep the dialog open but on the monitor that does not have the manuscript displayed.

With the Code Inserter macro, inserting code and applying the formatting options is easy: just click on the checkbox next to the name of the code (#2 and 3). As the below image shows (arrows), the correct codes are inserted and the head has been capitalized, each done with a single click of the mouse.

Manuscript with coding applied

If you work on long documents and need to apply codes and format according to a design, using Code Inserter both speeds the process significantly and increases accuracy — no more mistyping, retyping, or forgetting to apply a format. Style Inserter is just as easy as Code Inserter to use. Its basic operation is the same as Code Inserter and its Manager nearly a duplicate.

Regardless of whether you code or style, every second you save in the process adds more profitability. As I have emphasized in previous essays, editing is a business. Just as our clients are interested in reducing their editorial costs, we need to be interested in increasing our profitability by being more efficient and accurate. The macros in EditTools are designed to do just that — increase profitability and accuracy.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Related An American Editor essays are:

• The Business of Editing: Correcting “Errors”
• The Business of Editing: Journals, References, & Dollars
• The Business of Editing: Making Search & Replace Efficient & Profitable
• The Business of Editing: Managing Comments with Comment Editor
• The Business of Editing: Clicking for Profit with Click List
• The Business of Editing: Keeping Reference Callouts in Number Order
• The Business of Editing: Using & Managing Bookmarks

____________

Looking for a Deal?

You can buy EditTools in a package with PerfectIt and Editor’s Toolkit at a special savings of $78 off the price if bought individually. To purchase the package at the special deal price, click Editor’s Toolkit Ultimate.

Business of Editing: The Quest for Rate Charts

It never fails. There is nothing more sure than that today someone will ask “What should I charge [or pay]?” and someone will reply “Take a look at the EFA rate chart.” I think the publication of this chart is a great disservice to editorial freelancers.

Even if the chart was statistically valid, which it is a very, very long way from being, the publication of a rate chart by what purports to be the national voice for editorial freelancers is a disservice. If it has to exist, then it should be accessible by members only.

What is wrong with making the chart publicly available? What is wrong with using it to set your rates? What is wrong with clients relying on it to set limits?

False Expectations

There are several reasons why making the chart publicly available is bad for freelancing. First, it sets false expectations. The expectation is that someone new to freelancing can earn the listed rates. It also sets the expectations of clients. Why should/would a client pay you $50 an hour when the top rate for “basic copyediting” is $40 according to the chart? The one thing I definitely want when speaking with a client is for the client to be wholly ignorant of this chart because it sets false expectations — it bears no relationship to the value of my services or the services that I perform under the rubric “basic copyediting.”

I fall back on what I repeatedly say both here on An American Editor and on forums when I respond to these questions: How can you, the editor, set your rate if you do not know your required effective hourly rate (rEHR)? (For discussion on how to calculate your rEHR, see the “What to Charge” series of essays.) Of what value is it to “know” that the rate chart says you should charge $25 an hour if your rEHR is $50. It is not possible to sustain a business when you earn half of what you need to earn to pay your bills. And how can you, the client, know what to pay if you do not know what services are included and excluded, the experience of the editor, the editor’s skill level, and myriad other things that can only be learned via discussion with the editor?

Who Responded to the Underlying Survey?

Charts like the EFA’s chart become the gospel for rates. Rate charts never tell you to figure out what you need to charge; instead, they tell you what some group of unknown responders charge. Which is the second problem with the chart: Who are the people who provided the underlying data — the survey responders — and how many of them did so? In the case of the EFA rate chart, the responders to the rate survey are EFA members only, many of whom are “young” (in the sense of years of experience) freelancers. And if past EFA rate surveys are any kind of guide as to the number of responders, you are talking about a very small, statistically unrepresentative number; in the past, the number has been less than 10% of the group membership, which is not a lot of responders considering the overall number of editorial freelancers in the United States.

And the Definition is …

A third problem is definition. What precisely do “basic copyediting” and “heavy copyediting” include/exclude? How do they differ from “developmental” and “substantive/line” editing? How many of the responders to the survey from which these results were drawn listed themselves as providers of only “basic copyediting”? How many claimed to be “developmental” editors? More importantly, how did the responders define these terms in relation to their own practices? For example, if they provide “basic copyediting,” did their real-world practice include more, fewer, or exactly the same services as the EFA definition? Knowing the definitions is important because if you define “basic” as including services A, B, C, D, and E, but some responders only include A, C, and D, and others include only A, B, C, and E, and yet others include A to E plus F, the rate chart will not be pertinent to your business yet might well serve to limit what you can charge.

Does Experience Matter?

Which raises a fourth problem: How many, for example, developmental editing projects over how many years have those responders who claim to be developmental editors done? A person who has done one 25-page developmental project in 5 years is not someone on whom I would rely for what-to-charge advice. Of course, the same question can be asked of those who claim to do basic copyediting because the same problem exists with them. I would also want to know what the average yearly gross income has been for these responders. To me, it makes a world of difference if I am getting the advice from someone with 3 years of editing experience who has done 10 projects in those 3 years and has earned on average $25,000 a year as opposed to getting the advice from an editor who has 10 years of experience, edited a few hundred projects over that time, and has averaged $100,000 a year in earnings.

Are Our Clients Similar?
What About Subject Matter?

Bringing me to a fifth problem, which has two aspects: First, who are the responders’ clients and second, in which subject areas do the responders work? Who one’s clients are matters a great deal. I remember one EFA rate survey from many years ago where there was one responder who at that time earned $75 an hour when most of us struggled to earn $15 an hour. The reason for the disparity became clear when it was learned that the responder only worked for pharmaceutical companies and on documents that had to be filed with the Food and Drug Administration — a true specialty. At that time, university presses paid highly experienced editors $10-$12 an hour and large medical publishers paid those same editors $12-$16; fiction editors were paid $8-$10. The point is that clients matter and subject area matters. Are the responders’ clients publishers or authors? Are we talking fiction or nonfiction? Specialty or general? None of this is disclosed so how reliable or usable is the information provided?

Experience Again

A sixth problem, which is related to earlier noted problems, addresses experience. For example, last year I edited a manuscript that ran close to 20,000 manuscript pages; I also edited several other projects that year. How much volume did the responders edit? Does it matter that a responder may have edited 50 documents ranging in size from 10 to 50 pages as opposed to the volume I edited? When discussing what to charge, should not the whole experience of the person giving the advice be considered? Yet the EFA rate chart makes no mention of the experience of the responders in each category.

Did You Make a Profit or Suffer a Loss?

The final problem I will mention is this: I have no idea whether the responders made a profit or suffered a loss by charging what they did. More importantly, I have no idea how they decided to charge whatever they charged. As I noted at the beginning, it does me no good to charge less than my rEHR because I will never have enough money to stay even with my bills. So, did a responder decide she could charge $20 an hour because her significant other was paying the household bills or because her retirement pension made up the difference or because she never calculated her rEHR but thought that $20 an hour was all the market would pay for her services? Or was there some other reason? Isn’t it important to know the basis for what the responders charge when deciding to adopt this rate chart for your own business?

What a colleague charges never enters into my consideration as to what I should charge for the same service except if it is significantly more than I charge or plan to charge. Then I add the information to the data mix. But I never consider any rate information provided by colleagues unless that rate information is greater than my rEHR. When I set my rates, I do so based on my skill level, the schedule, my market, and other data that are specific to me and my business. My experience and skills, honed over 31 years of specialty work, have a significance in my market that it may not have in other markets or in the markets of colleagues. That you and I both do “copyediting” is meaningless for determining the rate I should charge if your editing is solely for indie authors and in fiction and mine is solely with publishers in electrical engineering.

There are additional problems (e.g., how many responses were received for each category? What is the geographical distribution of the responders [e.g., do New York City-based editors receive higher pay than Sioux City, Iowa editors]?) with the EFA rate chart, but aren’t these enough?

It’s a Solution, But Not a Good One

The information the EFA rate chart provides is valuable if properly used. The problem is that it is not properly used and it is not properly displayed. Sure there are disclaimers, such as the chart should be used only as a “rough guide,” but those disclaimers cannot overcome the perception that this is what an editor should charge and a client should pay. Every time someone responds to a rate question with “Take a look at the EFA rate chart for guidance,” they do themselves and their colleagues a great disservice. The rate chart is the easy solution to a difficult problem, but the fact that it is an easy solution does not make it a good solution.

In my view, if the EFA feels it needs to have a rate chart, it should restrict access to members only and prohibit its being shared with nonmembers. By doing that it will minimize the damage the rate chart causes by setting client expectations. I think the EFA would do much better by its members and the public if it educated members on how to calculate what to charge based on a member’s individual circumstances and if it educated clients on what editors do, why what editors do is valuable, and why editors charge what they do.

What do you think?

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Worth Noting: Editing Canadian English

I received the following announcement from the Editor’s Association of Canada and thought it worth passing on. I have not personally reviewed Editing Canadian English, but I am thinking of buying a print copy when it is available to add to my resource library. The following is reprinted as provided by the Editor’s Association of Canada:

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Editing Canadian English—a style guide, reference manual, judgment-call coach, and much more—is an indispensable tool for writing and editing in “Canadian.” Written by expert editors from Editors Canada and beyond, it presents a flexible but systematic approach to creating workable Canadian styles.

Some of the common questions addressed by the third edition of Editing Canadian English include these:

• What are the differences between proofreading, copy editing, stylistic editing, and structural editing, and how do I know which role is required?
• When is it appropriate to adapt Canadian words that an international audience might stumble over?
• What are the biases common in Canada and how do I correct for them?
• How do I settle on a Canadian spelling when even our dictionaries can’t agree?
• What punctuation issues are specific to Canada?
• How do I reconcile the metric versus imperial mix that characterizes Canadian usage?
• How do I work with French text in English documents?

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Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Makings of an Unprofessional Editor

I like to think that all of my colleagues are professionals. I take pride in my editing career and in my skills as an editor. Thus, when confronted with editorial rigidity, I shudder and think “there goes an unprofessional editor.”

What brings this to mind are posts in another forum in which a “professional” editor declared that using a comma before “and” (as in a serial [Oxford] comma) is always wrong and that the very first thing the editor does is search for those commas to delete them. Another editor stated that she refuses to work with authors who are unwilling to accept as gospel her punctuation decisions, including removal of that pesky comma.

If you ask editors with opinions such as these the basis for their position, it usually boils down to “that’s the rule and rules are rules, made to be adhered to, not broken!” Grammatical rigidity is not, in my book, the sign of a professional editor.

First, think about the rule of no serial commas. If strictly applied, it would be “I thank my parents, John Jones and God,” which is easily interpreted as Jones and God being the parents. Perhaps Jones and God are the parents but what if they are not? What if the thank you was supposed to be “I thank my parents, John Jones, and God,” which is interpretable as “my parents and also Jones and God.” The obvious point is that rigidity in application of editorial rules does not always produce the correct textual meaning.

Second, think about the rules themselves. It is not possible to ascribe them immortality. Language changes, especially English, perhaps French less so thanks to its language academy, and if language changes but the rules do not, we get the awkward constructions that often occur when the “rule” against splitting infinitives or the “rule” prohibiting ending a sentence with a preposition is arbitrarily applied.

Of course, the easy response is that it is today’s rules that are applied today, not yesterday’s rules. But how did yesterday’s rules become yesterday’s rules? Some professional editor had to show flexibility; in the absence of such flexibility no one would have been exposed to the change that is today.

There are many problems with inflexible editors, that is, editors who apply rules so rigidly it is hard to understand what the role of the editor is. Inflexible editors are like computer macros — they see something that fits the pattern and assume that they have the cure. Professional editors use tracking because we know that someone else (usually the author) may well have a different opinion and want to undo the changes we made.

Unprofessional editors are a problem for professional editors because they inspire their clients to complain loudly in public forums about poor editing and how much better it would have been had the client self-edited. They are a problem because they tend to cheapen the value of editing.

More importantly, unprofessional editors loudly proclaim what they are doing and thus influence other editors. There is nothing more heartbreaking as an editor to see another editor emulate an unprofessional editor, thinking that is the correct path to take.

There are lots of roads that will lead one down the path of unprofessionalism. Being unethical in one’s dealings with clients and colleagues is certainly such a road. But the more common road is rigidity in thinking and in applying “rules.” I think this road is also the more dangerous for the editorial profession.

How many times has an author posted a comment saying “I used to hire editors until I found that they were all bad” and then listing the reasons why they were bad editors, with a common one being inflexible thinking and rigid application of “rules.”

When I speak with these editors, I often ask if they understand how the “rules” came into being, what they represent, and how evolving language requires flexibility. I find that I am always disappointed in the responses. If I ask which rule book they are following, and then ask why they are not following a different rule book, the response is usually one that asks “Are you crazy? Everyone knows that the book I follow is the book to follow!”

We’ve discussed this before (see, e.g., “Dealing with Editor’s Bias,” “The Business of Editing: Walking the Line,” “On Language: Are There Rules?,” and “What Do Editors Forget Most Often?“). The style guides and grammar books and usage books change. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, is in its 16th edition. What would be the need for 16 revisions if language, usage, and grammar didn’t change over time?

If the guides we use need to show flexibility, shouldn’t the editor who uses the guides also show some flexibility? Isn’t flexibility a key attribute of professionalism? Isn’t the ultimate test that the reader understands the author’s message?

I may be parochial in my thinking, but I find it difficult to comprehend how the application of a “rule” either furthers in all instances a reader’s understanding of an author’s message or makes the editor anything more than a robot. To me, the difference between a professional and an unprofessional editor is the editor’s decision making: The unprofessional editor does not need to make editorial decisions because those decisions have already been made for him; the editor only needs to apply them mechanically. The professional editor, however, needs to know the “rule” and needs to make the decision, in each instance, whether to apply or not apply the “rule.” The professional editor needs to make editorial decisions.

I make hundreds of editorial decisions in every project and I am prepared to defend my decisions. I let guides guide me, acting as advisors to inform my decision-making process. I do not let guides be the decision maker; that is what I am being paid to do — to make editorial decisions.

What do you think?

Richard Adin, An American Editor