The Challenge of Being an Author, After the Writing

Editing

So, I read this article:

How Much To Pay For a Book Editor

And it's fine.  Well stated.  Gives some pointers.

Just to clarify what we are about to discuss (in lieu of reading the article) these are the estimated costs they suggest:

~~~
For a 70,000-word book, your editing costs could be:

• Developmental editing: $.08 per word, or $5,600 total
• Basic copyediting: $.018 per word, or $1,260 total
• Proofreading: $.0113, or $791 total

It’s easy to extrapolate from this what your total expected editing cost could be. Fantasy, sci-fi, and epic novel writers should be forewarned.

For a 120,000-word book, your editing costs could be:

• Developmental editing: $.08 per word, or $9,600 total
• Basic copyediting: $.018 per word, or $2,160 total
• Proofreading: $.0113, or $1,356 total

~~~

Keep in mind, many authors want all three services to make sure their manuscript is as clean as possible.  Even the best writers need someone else to edit.  WE ARE NOT SUBJECTIVE!


Then the comments.  Why do we fall down this rabbit hole?  It's awful.

It starts with a few people saying that those prices are way too high.  Hey, if you want to shop around, more power to you!

Then there is this asshole:

• I can’t think of a world wherein I’d edit a 70,000-word book for $560. In fact, I would delete the email that asked me to do that, because the author either didn’t value my time and skill or didn’t have a clue what professional editing is worth.

It is completely within your rights to both act that way and feel that way, but... 

•  For editors who are charging pennies for what should be hours and hours and hours worth of work: I am saddened that you would ruin the market for those who have the expertise and ability to charge what it’s worth. 

Ruin the market?  It's called free market for a reason.  People are free to charge different prices.  I feel this bullying of "you must charge this much or you aren't being taken seriously as a professional" is bullshit.  I've seen it in the world of photography and heard about it in the world of balloon twisting.  There is a certain amount that covers cost of supplies.  Presumably no one is going to charge less than overhead.  That's just bad business.  After that, we're talking intellectual property, non physical goods and people can charge LITERALLY whatever the want.  I don't even think you have a right to an opinion about what they charge.  You only have a right to an opinion about what YOU charge.

The thing is, maybe some of these editors actually recognize that writing requires "hours and hours and hours worth of work" for which an author has not been paid yet and may never BE paid.

• Here’s the deal, guys: editing is a tough job, 

So is writing.

• and it’s worth every penny. 

While authors are in a world where sometimes the advances are quite small and the market so saturated, they can have a perfectly edited document, a great story, and a nice query letter and still never get published...

• If I’m going to edit a 70,000-word book, I know what I’m going to bring to the table that the cheap editors can’t.

Someone willing to charge less than $10,000 for a 120,000 word document isn't necessarily cheap.  Just reasonable. Don't bash people just because it makes it hard for you to make more money per hour than an author will ever make as an author in their entire lifetime.

Same editor in another comment said this:

• I can assure you every reader knows you skipped out on professional editing while reading your books. 

Which just pushes me toward seeing her arrogance.  I absolutely believe that you know editing was skipped when the book has errors.  I bet there are books that were not professionally edited that you CANNOT tell.  Disclaimer: I am not one of those authors.  Instead, my sister and I are learning a lot about editing (we both went to college, both write, and both enjoy learning) so that we can edit each other's work. I have that fortune...

I'll give you this, though:

• In fact, if you’re using a software for “editing,” that book is riddled with errors. Overflowing to the brim with them.

Some books almost make me cry.  Editing software is STUPID, guys.  Don't kid yourselves.  If you don't know when the computer is wrong and you are right and if you're not willing to fight an inanimate object to prove your point, then you NEED an editor because you probably don't know as much about punctuation and grammar as you think you do and probably less about things like continuity and objectivity.  Just saying.

It's like the time I was sitting in a writing group (which I have since left because, really, just... no) and there was this woman who had self-published in a dozen languages.  Someone asked how many languages she speaks.  "None," at which point her son jumped in to say, "You don't need to.  You just use google translation services.

The thing is, I've read a few books that went through an agent and a large publishing house and still escaped with multiple errors.  What's up with that?  It seems to happen more and more these days.  Cringe!  I've even found 3 in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the eBook version I just purchased so I could start reading it again.  It's a problem!  I can see one or two errors making it through, but it's been more prevalent.  Get it together, people!

Artists

This just reminds me of the entire subject.  I have compared writing to other independent artistry before.  For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to compare to a painter.  Both are creative endeavors.  Both make investments of time, education, and ripping out the heart to present it to people who may very well stomp on it, then set it on fire without caring a whit about the artists as human beings.

There have been a lot of things going around pointing out that an artist may charge $1,000 for a painting because you have to consider their time, their mistake, their learning process, their investments.

Yet they paint and then they sell.  That's kind of it.

Authors write.  They may spend a year on a novel.  Even if they wrote a whole novel in one month (NANOWRIMO), they may have been putting in more than 40 hour weeks during that month and once the month is over, it's not complete.  Smart authors will edit as much as they can themselves before heading to an editor.  This can take 2-3 more months.  And what if they have a day job?  That's a long day, every day.  Now they have to send it to an editor who complains that anyone who thinks it should cost less than a couple thousand dollars is not professional.  They edit, return the book, probably in a month (because if I'm paying an assload, I want it to be FAST!) and now it's the author's turn to sell it.

Lest anyone complain that artists pay for paint and authors use a home computer (which, to be fair, they probably already have for other things, these days) the next step of the author's process isn't free. Take synopsis and query letters, mail them paying for return postage as well.  After mailing out 50, let's say, someone wants to see the manuscript.  Hooray!  Now they have to pay the postage of sending a box AND return postage.  The publisher or agent rejects manuscript, sends it back, and if the author gets another bite, they send it all again.  This is not cheap, guys!

And authors pay all of it up front with no guarantees and everything to lose.  Tell me again how we don't value you as an editor when you clearly see authors as a paycheck, not of value as the people who create the literature from nothing and give us all something to enjoy!

Venting

Well, I'll probably eventually get caught for this and it's possible I'll hurt someone's feelings, but I just have to vent some frustrations in my day.

A Little Background Information
I've been designing webpages for independent artists.  Trying a little to make a business of it, but I realize it's slow going for multiple reasons.  I charge very little both because I realize some of the best indie artists have no money and because I am driven by passion for independence more than money.  I have a huge place in my heart for independent artists (visual, musical, writers, etc)...

But They Can Be Difficult To Work With
Despite the fact that I currently consider myself an independent artist, I sometimes cross paths with one that has me banging my head against the desk daily.

I used to spend hours upon hours writing code from scratch, then using CSS templates, but still spending hours to tweak the code until the the columns, boxes, padding, font size, and backgrounds were more to my liking.

I feel that because I don't charge very much, I'm completely justified in copping out to Wordpress these days.  (Besides, I am still a writer and taking time out of my own writing to work on these web pages and I'm not really getting paid enough to quit my day job so to speak.)  Wordpress, of course, limits one on exact design layout and a few other niggly little things I used to stick in my web pages (iFrames, for starters).  There is good reason for those changes, but it limits my creativity nonetheless.

I like doing web pages because I feel creative.  I think I do a decent job writing the blurbs and the sales pitches (90% of those writing moments are left to me).  I enjoy visual art, but I'm not a painter or sculptor so I enjoy working with colors, layouts, images, and other physical attributes.

Sometimes, the artist I'm working with wants to have a say in all of those things as well...

I'm Hitting my 'Patience' Wall
A couple of years ago, I worked with this lovely lady who is crusading to help bipolar and depressed women.  At least, that was her platform. Then it was bullying, it appears, and now it's every level of depression and suicide.

Well, because they (her and her speaking partner) are picking up steam with their speaking engagements, have made come international contacts, and feel they would like a new direction, I've been asked to revamp the webpage from top to bottom.

So I'm completely rebuilding the page for this client because we are moving hosting companies and of course there is the transfer from CSS to Wordpress. At our first meeting, she handed me a screen cap of her old web page with scratches made through most of it, circling a page here and there, and adding her own text in between.

Problem one, she wants me to keep this and add that, but now we have a wordy, convoluted mess.  I work it, edit, reword, move around, and choose careful wording to remain concise, but she comes back and says she wants this word and that word added back into it.  My words cover what she's saying, but she needs those words in it.  So now we have run on sentences listing synonyms as though each word is a new idea.

Then she talks to other people, none of them professionals (neither am I, of course, but I've built well over a dozen pages from scratch back in the old days of HTML, each time using a new technique to create something interesting and giving each page its own personality).  The feedback she's getting is from the guy who writes children's books and the other guy who built a writing club web page which is dry, unfocused, and generally boring using Word Press and no other web pages to my knowledge.

After those consultations, she'll throw more emails at me.  D said this.  M said that.  Well, their information contradicts so what do you want?  Or sometimes it doesn't contradict, it's just more information.  I'm glad you took a seminar about how to use Google Stats and meta tags.  I feel like adding more and more and more and more is just creating a mess!  I can't worry about stats until we have a solid webpage built that isn't going to change every time someone comes back to find information they noticed last time they were there!

 She also goes around online and when she sees something she likes, she sends it; sometimes forgetting to mention what she likes about it, but more often than not, showing me something like 10 different ways she wants her menu.  Seriously?  Pick ONE.  Or two and I'll give you a couple options so you can pick one.  Because frankly you can only have one menu.

I had a design I thought was perfect.  On the landing page, you have a short menu at the side, an image up front, and a brief statement that says "If you're here because you're depressed, we can help" (only it says it way better).

D says they don't want anyone to have to scroll to find the initial information so I should have a top bar menu.  Okay.  You didn't have to scroll, but you want a top bar menu?  Fine.  I make a top bar menu.  Now she has used Word to create a document saying she wants the page to look like this (more or less):  Top inch, web page name.  Below that, their 3 inch logo.  Under that, a their tagline.  Beneath that, the menu bar, then below that, a video to introduce themselves and then, finally, the statement saying why they're here.

So now the menu is about halfway down the page on my large monitor and the video of them is cut off so you have to scroll down to see it.

Meanwhile with first menu I did, the side menu was high enough that it ended before halfway down the page, then you hover and it drops down a the sub menu and sub sub menus.  Now the drop downs will cover the video.  No harm done, I suppose, but on a smaller screen you are going to be scrolling down.

So what the hell was so wrong with the first one I did??

Last week she called on the phone.  We played a little phone tag because I was pretty busy that day, but when we talked, she said she wanted to change up the menus a bit.  I grumbled internally, but saw that a little rearranging of the dozen pages I already created would do the trick.

Then over the weekend, she sends the file with the suggested page layout (which I don't like, btw, but it's not about me) and below that, 3 pages of suggested menu items.

It means totally deleting about 8 pages I already researched and created.

It also means creating about 8 new pages of information which she described only as "include reviews, cost and email request" or "Step 1. I want to Recover", "3 stages of recovery" and things like that.  I told her she needed to research that information herself, but again with the... Seriously?  You're the "expert" on the subject, but you are just giving me page names and expecting me to create content?  Research for you?

And then I think what happens when I create those 8 pages and then someone else says she should do it differently?  She'll drop 5 pages and ask for 5 new ones, I suppose.

I keep telling her she needs to focus and solidify her decisions.  She thinks she has, but then is easily swayed by someone else's thoughts.  So I think we've got direction, then the rug is pulled out and I have to crochet a new one.

Grrr

All whilst trying to prep 3 novels in hopes I can grapple myself an agent or publisher, editing a 4th so I feel ready to pitch it, and I don't remember the last time I got to write anything new on that 5th novel which I have completely outlined.  Since writing the new stuff is what makes a writer feel alive, it's rather disheartening every time my work is discounted and I'm asked to create all new work.