Thursday, September 9, 2010

The results of editing

Joel Palmer edited all three of my short stories and he did a great job. He caught the simple wording/grammar errors, but also noted plot issues and possible points of confusion. He charged me $112.50 to edit about 15,000 words, which comes to about $7.50 per 1,000 words. That’s a really good deal! Joel said my stories were in pretty good editorial shape to begin with, so he was able to shoot through it quickly. He charges $25/hour for editing, so his final fee varies based on how clean your manuscript is. He usually averages about 1,250 words per hour.

Before editing, my first short story, Angel, weighed in at 4,742 words. After I incorporated Joel’s edits, it came to 4,709 words. I agreed with virtually all of Joel’s edits, probably around 98%. He also noted three areas of confusion in his comments, which I made changes to address.

So you can see the effects of editing, I’ve uploaded all three versions of the first story. The pre-edit writer draft, the edited version with Joel’s revisions left in, and the final, cleaned up version.

Angel (pre-edit version)

Angel (edited version)

Angel (final version)

I think that Joel’s edits were incredibly helpful in polishing the stories. If you need an editor, I would definitely recommend him. Before you actually hire him, he will do an edit sample on some of your work so you can see his editing and he’ll estimate the time it will take him to edit the whole work.

Here are a couple ways to contact Joel:

joeldavidpalmer@gmail.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joeldavidpalmer

Thanks, Joel!

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for this. Maybe I'll try him out.

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  2. No problem, Moses. I'll be handing off my full novel manuscript to him in a couple weeks. I'll give a report on that editing process, probably in November.

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  3. Hi Derek,

    I'm considering going the epub route myself. I was wondering who did your cover?

    How much input/direction did you have? Did you start off with an idea for the cover or leave it all up to whoever you hired?

    Thanks.

    Chip

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  4. Chip/Alexander, Les Peterson did the cover for Dirty Deeds. He'll explain his iteration process with you. For Dirty Deeds, I just let Les read the stories and come up with his own cover idea. Then I provide a couple iterations of feedback and he was done.
    For Don't Dance, I had an idea and Igor drew to my specifications.

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  5. Thanks for the info! I'm still making my way through a major re-write but an editor has been on my mind for a while now. Sounds like he does a good service for a great price :)

    www.damselinadirtydress.blogspot.com

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