How to Find an Editor for Your Manuscript

Evaluating Sources of Editorial Service Providers

So: You’ve finished writing your manuscript. Good for you! Most people never finish their manuscript. For that matter, most people never start their manuscript. If you’ve completed your manuscript, it might be time to hire an editor. Or, it might not be. There are a lot of reasons not to rush out hire an editor for your completed manuscript, including:

• You want to do some personal revision or get feedback from early readers first.

• You hope to work with an agent and traditional publisher, and hope they will supply feedback and editing on their dime.

• You enjoy typos and you think your readers will, too.

I’m not here to judge. I have been an editor for a long time, and sometimes a developmental editor or copyeditor, and sometimes even on a freelance basis—however, I do not currently provide those services for hire and I’m not in the employment market. I am here with truthful and bias-free advice on finding an editor and pricing out the work. I am not trying to sell you any goods or services. I would like it if you subscribed to Shelf Life, but that’s free.

As an editor, I believe that:

• Every manuscript can benefit from professional editing; and

• No manuscript requires professional editing to be published.

I believe both of these like they are cold, hard facts; although I guess technically they are just my opinions. It’s a fact that no book needs to be edited before publication. People publish unedited books all the time. There are many publication services available that will make a book publicly available without regard to whether it has been edited. Whether every manuscript can benefit from professional editing, I believe this is true but your mileage may vary.

This is not the article to help you figure out whether you need an editor or not. This is the article that will help you find an editor and work out how much that editing will cost. If you’ve got a new-minted manuscript on your hands and you’ve decided you wish to have it edited, but you’re not sure where to find a reputable editor, then read on.

Or read on anyway, I’m not the boss of you. Do what you want.

How Do I Find an Editor?

The question is really how to find an editor you can trust. How to find a reputable, experienced, or credentialed editor—if those things are important to you. And how to find an editor you feel good about working with—not only someone who will deliver an edited manuscript timely for the agreed-upon amount of money, but someone who understands and appreciates your writing. An editor you can vibe with.

There’s no regulating body for editors like some jobs have. You can’t just walk out the door with some handcuffs you got on Amazon and declare yourself a police officer. You can’t just put on a stethoscope and start seeing patients. Those professions have regulating bodies that make sure the people practicing those professions are who they say they are. Practicing medicine or—uh, policing? I guess?—without the right credentials or licensure will get you in big trouble.

But anyone can set up a business as an editor if they can convince clients to pay them money for their editorial services. When searching for an editor, you might find someone like me—I’ve been doing editing work for 20 years, I have certifications, I participate in professional societies for editorial professionals, and I’ve edited hundreds of manuscripts—or you might find the guy who always notices typos on restaurant menus and decided to try his hand at editing books instead of just telling the wait staff their menu has a typo. It’s crème brûlée, okay? With a grave, a circumflex, and an acute. 

That can make it challenging to know what you’re getting when you set out to hire an editor.

I’ll start with some of the most common ways people find editors and give some pros and cons to all of them. There’s no one source of infinite great editors available to work on manuscripts, so you may have to use a combination of the methods—and maybe some of your own, too.

Ask Your Writer Friends for a Recommendation

Writing is a solitary activity but many writers have a social element to their writing life—online forums they participate in, #WritingTwitter, a critique partner or group, classmates or former classmates, and so on. If you have writer friends, ask around to see if anyone can recommend an editor. This method won’t yield a lot of names—many writers don’t have an editor they work with, and those who do probably have only one—but the names you get will be vetted. Your friends will be able to tell you all about the quality of work, timeliness, how much they like working with the editor, and price range.

When evaluating the recommendation you get from a friend, it’s helpful to consider whether the friend writes in the same genre as you. If they write historical romance and you write science fiction, the editor may or may not be a match. Plenty of editors work across genres, but not all do. What if your friend writers historical romance and you wrote a cookbook? That’s an even bigger difference in content—again not to say the same editor couldn’t do both (I’ve edited both historical romance novels and cookbooks) but someone who is a dab hand at one may be lackluster at another.

You must also be a little cautious of friends recommending someone who is not their editor. For instance, if you say “Hey writer friend, I’m looking for an editor, do you have an editor you use and like?” and they say, “Well I don’t have an editor but I know an editor I can put you in touch with, he’s great, he always notices typos on restaurant menus.” Any recommendation is worth considering, but make sure you know whether someone comes recommended by someone who has used their services or someone who’s just heard of them.

Try a Professional Association

There are professional associations that editors can join as part of their networking/continuing education/professional development and many of these associations also have a method for connecting their members with those who are out there searching for their services. This is a great way to find a lot of potential editors to screen in one (or a few) places. 

These professional associations do not, typically, screen members’ backgrounds or review their resumes as a prerequisite to joining. For instance, the Editorial Freelancers Association specifies in their FAQ that someone may join even if they have no editorial experience. This is not an indication of lax standards—part of what people sign up with these organizations for is access to classes and professional development. Some people may join to learn editing. It’s just important to bear in mind that someone is not necessarily experienced just because they belong to a professional organization.

To begin with, the Editorial Freelancers Association (the EFA, I mentioned them above) is an excellent resource to find an editor. They offer several excellent resources under their hiring directory including a new author guide, a handy breakdown of the types of editorial services their members provide, and their rates survey results. The EFA doesn’t set or govern rates but they survey their members periodically to find out what the median going rates are for different editorial services. Super helpful (and will crop up again in Thursday’s Part II).

The American Copy Editors Society (ACES) is also a great lead. You can scroll through their Editor for Hire directory and review profiles of editors alongside their contact details if you’d like to inquire or hire. Similarly, the National Association of Independent Writers & Editors (NAIWE) makes it easy for writers to search their member directory to find a professional.

In addition to the professional associations that exist for editors, there are also professional associations for writers, and some of those help their member writers find editorial professionals. For instance, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) keeps a writer services list, which is accessible to the public without a membership. It’s worth checking out whether there’s a professional association for the type of writing you do and, if so, seeing whether they have a directory of editorial service providers available (note that many orgs have this behind their membership paywall).

Search a Service-Provider Clearinghouse

I’m never sure what to call these. Today I’m going with “clearinghouse.” These are sites that allow editorial service providers, and possibly knowledge workers of other types, to make their services available to all members of the site. The service provider creates a page (in essence, a storefront) on the site, describes their services and fees, and waits for users of the site to hire them for jobs.

Perhaps the best-known clearinghouse in this space for publishing services is Reedsy, a site devoted to helping authors assemble a team of professionals to help publish their book. Other sites in this space that host editors—but not exclusively book-publishing professionals—include Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer.

In the pro column  of these clearinghouses—you’re going to find a lot of providers and their prices are likely to be very clearly explained. Further, most sites of this type allow service consumers to rate their experience with service providers and leave reviews, so a savvy searcher can use those ratings and reviews to rank evaluate the quality and reliability of providers on the site.

Users should remain mindful that, as with any other source of editors, there’s no screening process to ensure providers meet any minimum qualifications. Anyone may put up a store front and begin taking clients. There’s also the possibility of subcontracting—meaning the person you speak with might not be the person who ultimately edits your manuscript. Read reviews carefully for the best chance at finding an editor with many satisfied clients.

Read Individual Editors’ Websites

Finally, the slowest method: Google something like “editors for hire” or “book editors freelance” and then you look at the results that come up.

Danger zone: The first thing you’re going to see in the “sponsored” search results are companies that sell book-editing services, not individual editors. “Isn’t that what I want? Companies that sell book-editing services?” Possibly. These companies use staff or contractors who are not in the United States; typically these folks are in India or the Philippines. This is a very different service than “hiring an editor” to work with. You will likely not interact with your editor, and instead will submit files and receive files back and interact with a customer-service rep. However, because the editorial work is done offshore, the rates may be very low compared with those of the editors you find through the other methods I’ve suggested. 

The quality of editorial work done by a person in India or the Philippines is not appreciably different than the work done by a person in the United States—experience, education, and command of the language vary from individual to individual and plenty of people with all those things live outside the United States. It is, rather, the assembly line–style workflow and lack of personalization/personal contact with the editor that may not end up being the experience you’re expecting.

So—scroll past those sponsored results, or don’t. Up to you. 

After you’ve scrolled past all the corporations, clearinghouses, and associations in the results, you’ll start to find individual peoples’ websites. These will be many of the same folks whose names you already found among the resources of the professional associations above, and perhaps some of the same folks recommended by your friends. Most freelance editors are not so loaded up with work that they can advertise their services in only one place (their website), so many of the sites that come up will be sites you’ve already spotted if you looked through the EFA or ACES or NAIWE directories.

What Next?

If you’ve reviewed the resources above, you’ve probably come up with a longlist of potential editors. But how can you tell which ones are the real deal, which ones are charlatans, and which one is the right editor for your manuscript? I’ll continue pulling on this thread on Thursday with advice on how to evaluate the editors you’re considering, rank them, and choose your creative partner.

---

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.