THE PRACTICAL WRITER How to Get Paid
Freelance editing.
LAST year James Wolf, a retired insurance agent making his first foray into literary fiction, sent portions of his unpublished novel, “No Good Day to Die,” to a handful of agents and publishers. In their responses the industry experts all told Wolf essentially the same thing: that his novel, an eighthundred-page fictional recounting of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn and its aftermath, had promise but that it needed a lot of work before it could be published.
One publishing professional, however, went one step further. Kathy Springmeyer of Sweetgrass Books, the selfpublishing arm of Farcountry Press in Helena, Montana, referred Wolf to novelist Russell Rowland, who has long maintained a sideline as a freelance editor for aspiring authors. When the two men met, they quickly hit it off, and Wolf agreed to pay Rowland $4,000 to edit his manuscript.
“If I’m going to make my book substantially better, my position was I needed help,” Wolf says of his decision to hire an editor. “I’m a first-time author and never had anything published before. When I started this, one of the questions I had for myself was, ‘What the hell do I know about writing a book?’”
Wolf is hardly alone in asking this question. Spurred by innovations in e-book and print-on-demand technology, American authors self-published more than a million books in 2017, an increase of more than 150 percent since 2012, according to a report by Bowker, an affiliate of the database firm ProQuest. At the same time, the traditional publishing industry is shrinking at an alarming rate, having shed roughly a third of its workforce from its height in the 1990s, with an especially precipitous drop after the 2008 financial crisis, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As a practical matter this means there are fewer editors at publishing houses to take on new work, and those who remain have less time to guide promising but flawed manuscripts into print.
And there is another layer to all of this: As the traditional publishing industry constricts, published writers are, perhaps not surprisingly, earning less from their work. A 2018 Authors Guild survey found that the median income writers earn from their books dropped by half since 2009,
with writers of literary fiction taking the largest hit. In the survey, authors who reported working full-time as writers earned a median income of just $20,300 a year, which, as the survey notes, is below the federal poverty line for a family of three.
Put it all together and you have record numbers of aspiring authors looking to publish their work in an ever-tightening market at the very moment that a growing number of experienced authors are struggling to find new ways to monetize their literary skills. Combine this with digital tools that allow writers and editors to connect and exchange manuscripts online and you have the ingredients for a quiet explosion in the demand for freelance editors.
“What you’re seeing today is that writers are earning less on their books, so they’re looking for other ways to supplement their income,” says Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild. “As a professional author you have a certain skill set that you’ve probably trained your entire life to perfect. Most writers knew they wanted to write since the time they were children. There are other ways that you can monetize that, and editing other people’s books is one of them.”
Still, even for writers with long publishing track records, it’s hardly a matter of hanging out a shingle as an editor and waiting for the money to roll in. Competition for editing work can be intense, in part because waves of layoffs in the publishing industry have pushed many former book editors into the freelance ranks, and clients can be slow to materialize, especially in the beginning.
Some freelance editors advertise their services in the classified pages of Poets & Writers Magazine or in the member directory on the Editorial Freelancers Association website (www .the-efa.org), while others try to build visibility by being active in Facebook writers groups or on websites like Inked Voices or Writers Helping Writers. Those willing to bid for jobs can also find work on online exchanges like Upwork. But even writers who have been working as freelance editors for years say the bulk of their clients still come via word of mouth, most often from writing workshops they’ve taught or from agents and editors looking to outsource some of their editorial workload.
Rowland’s collaboration with Wolf illustrates how the market for editorial freelancers works. Rowland, the author of seven books including Cold Country, due out from Dzanc Books this fall, picked up his first editing clients fifteen years ago, when students in his online classes at the Gotham Writers Workshop began to ask if he were available to work with them privately. Even now, he says, most of his clients are former students or were referred to him by people he knows in publishing. That’s how he connected with Wolf. Sweetgrass Books distributes two of Rowland’s books, so when Sweetgrass’s Springmeyer saw that Wolf needed a private editor, she thought of Rowland.
Before Wolf could hire Rowland, however, the two men needed to agree on a fair price for the work. This is without a doubt the most fraught element of the writer-editor relationship. The Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) publishes a rate sheet on its website that suggests a minimum rate of nine dollars per page for a developmental edit. At that rate, Rowland’s work on Wolf’s eight-hundred-page manuscript would have cost at least $7,200.
But while the EFA rate sheet serves as an unofficial industry standard, it is intended only as a rough guideline, and all editors still set their own fees. Rowland, for instance, charges from five to ten dollars per double-spaced page, which for a three-hundred-page manuscript works out to between $1,500 and $3,000. Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car (Liveright, 2016) and another longtime editorial freelancer, calculates her rates a different way, charging four cents a word, which comes out to $3,200 for an 80,000-word book.
But even within these ranges there can be enormous variations. A very rough draft by an inexperienced writer takes more time to edit than a highly polished manuscript, so editors often charge more for a book that needs a lot of work. A client’s ability to pay can play a role in pricing too, Dermansky says. “If I get a really great book by a struggling person who reaches out to me personally, I have lowered my rates,” she says. “On the other hand I’ve gotten queries from lawyers from really fancy offices, and I’ve been like, ‘Maybe I won’t lower my rates for them.’”
In the case of Wolf’s eight-hundred-page Little Bighorn novel, Rowland agreed to charge the first-time author at the lower end of his usual scale for a simple, if perhaps fiscally imprudent, reason: He liked Wolf. “That was a compromise, mainly because he’s just such a nice guy,” Rowland says with a laugh.
While most editorial freelancers come to the work with a lengthy record of publication or deep connections in publishing, or both, a small number of enterprising writers have built lucrative editing practices without possessing much of either.
Kallie Falandays, a rare freelance editor who specializes in poetry, was still finishing her MFA at Wichita State University in 2013 when she started a blog called Tell Tell Poetry (www.telltellpoetry.com), featuring interviews with poets. When she first launched the blog, Falandays inserted a link noting that poets could connect with her to have their poems critiqued. “After about two years I noticed that a lot of people were e-mailing me for editing services, so I flipped the site to be an editing site with a blog on the side,” she says. “Since then it’s kind of grown organically.”
Today, just six years after she started her blog, Falandays estimates that she works with 120 poets a year and employs two additional freelancers to help
her keep up with demand. Between her poetry editing and a busy freelance copywriting practice, Falandays, an American who now lives in Porto, Portugal, earns $65,000 to $70,000 a year and recently bought a house.
Tell Tell Poetry thrives in part because it offers a wide array of services. A visitor to the site can receive a critique of a single poem within twenty-four hours or have Falandays and her staff edit an entire book of poems, which can cost up to $1,600 for a 65-page collection. But Falandays, the author of Dovetail Down the House (Burnside Review
Press, 2016), also offers clients the option of paying her to help them design and produce a self-published collection. That service, which includes a detailed critique of the manuscript, along with guidance on choosing publishing platforms, design of the book jacket, and a marketing blurb, maxes out at $4,900.
“It’s definitely different than running a publishing house because I don’t have to think about, ‘Okay, can this book sell?’” Falandays says of her work. “And many times my clients don’t really care as much about whether it will sell. For a lot of them it’s something they care about deeply and that they want to produce as a life’s goal. It’s on their bucket list.”
Like Falandays, Dermansky has managed to cobble together something resembling a middle-class living from her freelance work. In her busiest year, two years ago, Dermansky made $60,000 from editing, though she says most years she has earned closer to $30,000. For the better part of a decade, steady editing work has enabled Dermansky to support herself and her young daughter while giving her time for her own fiction. Ultimately, though, she has her doubts about whether freelancing makes sense as a lifelong career, and with a new novel, Very Nice, due out from Knopf in July, she says she has become more selective about the editing projects she takes on.
“Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘This really isn’t a sustainable way to live,’” she says. “That sounds like a lot of money, but if you’re supporting a family, it’s really not at all.”
Indeed, given the unpredictable paydays and the constant hustling required to drum up new clients, freelance editing isn’t a very sustainable way to live, and according to the Authors Guild survey, few writers try to make a full-time job of it. Just 7 percent of writers in the survey who reported working as editors earned more than $20,000 a year, and a scant 2 percent made more than $40,000 annually. By contrast, nearly threequarters of freelance editors in the survey earned less than $5,000 a year from the work, and more than half made less than $2,000 annually.
Jennifer Baker is among the large pool of writers who treat part-time editing work as a welcome side gig. A fiction writer and essayist who works as a production editor for the Teachers College Press in New York City, Baker earns a few thousand dollars a year editing manuscripts outside her regular work hours. This arrangement is just fine with Baker, who is also a contributing editor to Electric Literature and the editor of the short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria, 2018). “I work a full-time job for a reason,” she says. “Freelancing is a hard thing—it’s not impossible, but it’s a hard thing to make a living at. I think people need to be realistic about what it is. If you’re going to be freelancing as a permanent thing, you’d better have some savings.”
Drawing on her experience on the production side of publishing, Baker says she sees herself primarily as a line editor, adept at digging deeply into her clients’ sentences to maximize their impact and resonance. But Baker, who is Black, says her experience as a writer of color in a largely white publishing world also shapes how she responds to her clients’ work. “I think what I offer is that I don’t make presumptions and maybe someone else might,” she says. “I don’t make presumptions about cultures that aren’t mine. I ask a lot of questions. I acknowledge what I do and don’t know, and I pose questions that initiate a conversation rather than say things like, “Don’t you think it would be better if everyone was poor?’”
This emphasis on asking probing questions rather than simply offering solutions to stubborn writing problems is also central to novelist Janice Eidus’s work as a writing coach in New York City. Where an editor typically focuses on a single manuscript that a writer plans to revise for publication, Eidus says, writing coaches serve more in the role of a teacher or mentor, giving their clients the tools to shape the stories they want to tell and fashion a style of their own.
“I don’t go in and overhaul somebody else’s work and kind of rewrite it for them,” she explains. “I coach writers to find and express their own voices, what they wish to say in their work. I am meticulous and detailed in
“As a professional author you have a certain
skill set that you’ve probably trained your
entire life to perfect,” says Mary Rasenberger,
executive director of the Authors Guild.
“Most writers knew they wanted to write
since the time they were children. There are
other ways that you can monetize that, and
editing other people’s books is one of them.”
my comments, and I’m very careful to let clients see not only what isn’t working, but what is, which many editors don’t do.”
Eidus, herself the author of five books, has been coaching writers off and on since the late 1990s. At any one time, she says, she is working with as many as a dozen clients, some who come to her for a few intensive sessions focused on one writing project, others she has been coaching for years. “It’s incredibly rewarding when you’re working with someone over the long haul,” she says. “You can really develop a deep relationship. You can see them blossom.”
Whether they’re focused on helping a writer overhaul a single manuscript or on building a long-term relationship as a writing coach, editorial freelancers say they recognize the delicate nature of the role they play in the creative lives of aspiring writers who yearn for publication but lack the experience, and occasionally the skills, to attain it.
“I understand that people work so hard on their books and they’re kind of handing all their hopes to you in a way,” Dermansky says. “People just want to get published so badly, and I feel that pressure. Sometimes I’ll read people’s books and I’ll feel nervous, like, ‘What am I going to say to them?’” Whatever Russell Rowland found to say to James Wolf about “No Good Day to Die,” it seems to have struck a chord, leaving the seventy-eight-yearold first-time novelist excited to get back to work on his manuscript and cautiously optimistic about finding a home for it with a traditional publishing house.
“I’m confident that it’ll be worth it, particularly from the comments that Russell’s made,” Wolf says. “He’s pretty enthusiastic about the manuscript, and he’s a published author and teaches writing courses, so if he’s pleased with what it is and what it can become, then I’m pretty confident that the expense will be well worth it. But only time will tell.”
“I work a full-time job for a reason,”
says Jennifer Baker. “Freelancing is a
hard thing—it’s not impossible, but it’s a
hard thing to make a living at. I think people
need to be realistic about what it is. If you’re
going to be freelancing as a permanent
thing, you’d better have some savings.”