KOK Edit: Your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM)
KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) Katharine O'Moore Klopf
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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Doesn't All Editing Cost the Same?

Doesn't all editing cost the same? Spoiler: No.

This is why an editor's total fee differs among projects. In a corner of my office, on the wall, I have these editing speeds (number of 250-word manuscript pages per hour) posted from years ago when I worked on a lot of fiction manuscripts for mass-market paperbacks*:

Really messy mss.: 9 pp./h

Average mss.: 12–17 pp./h

Easy juvenile mss.: 19 pp./h


The bulk of the editing I do today is of manuscripts for biomedical journals, written by non-native speakers of English. My general editing speed for those:

2 pp./h


And of course each editor's speed is different, and a lot depends on how much work the manuscript needs, whatever the genre.

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*Printed dimensions: usually 6.75" × 4.25".



2 comments:

Bethanie said...

I am also an editor of biomedical manuscripts (and grant proposals, posters, slides, etc.) for non-native speakers of English, and I was feeling very, very slow reading your messy/average/easy speeds... Then I got to "2 pp./h" and thought,"Aaah, yes! That's more like it!". At least, on a good day with a not-so-messy manuscript! :)

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

I'm glad I could provide confirmation, Bethanie. And it's always nice to hear from another medical editor.

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