PRICING

The actual cost of your project will depend on the condition of what you submit to us as well as the services you want performed. However, we can give you more information than that fairly obvious tidbit.

HOW MUCH WILL MY  PROJECT COST?

For most material the calculator below will give an estimate quite close to the actual charge, and in any case you will receive a firm quote before we start work.

Before using the calculator, however, you are urged to look at Formatting and Editing Services to see what we do for your money—and just what we mean by “Copy Editing,” “Content Editing,” and the rest.

Price Estimator

The calculator below is, for the most part, reasonably accurate, but you will always get a firm quote before you commit to working with us.

For documents with special formatting requirements, such as tables or footnotes, the cost can be significantly higher than the calculator indicates; also, documents which are not submitted to us in accordance with our document guidelines can cost more.

On the other hand: for very clean submissions with few typos or grammar errors, you can get copy editing performed for the price of proofreading, and similar reductions for the other levels of editing.

HOW DO WE COMPARE?

Interested in whether we’re on the expensive or affordable side? This is the section to look at.

Formatting Costs

You can format a book yourself for free, using Vellum or Calibre or numerous other tools. If you consider yourself highly computer literate, one of these might be an option for you; otherwise, the time you spend on the task can easily translate to many times the cost of what we charge.

More importantly, though—to put it bluntly, we do a better job. (See Formatting Services to see what we can do for you.) If you’re happy to have your book look like the bulk of self-published books out there, and you can manage it yourself, go for it. If you want your book to look classier than that, hire us.

Why us? To start with, we contend that no one does a better job. Besides, among the best formatters, our rates (use the calculator, above) are probably the lowest. Do your own comparisons (and make sure to check out the quality while you’re at it).

Editing Costs

Editorial tasks are, by nature, more expensive than formatting. (See Editorial Services for what we do.)

Our rates, though, are among the lowest in the business. If you like, compare our rates to the common rates posted by the Editorial Freelancers Association at their website. The minimum standard rate for developmental editing (the closest equivalent on the EFA website to our content editing) is around $9.00/page—and that's just the developmental editing. Our content editing includes subsequent line editing and heavy copy editing. Add that up and you get a likely minimum, elsewhere, of $23.50 per page, compared to about $11.50 for us. And if all you want is proofreading, that’s only about $1.50/page.

(To compare the rates on the EFA website with those you find here, it helps to know that 1,000 words is equivalent to 4 manuscript pages, so a 100,000 word book would be about 400 manuscript pages.)

Keep in mind, when comparing, that whatever editing level you hire us for, we include all the less expensive levels at no extra charge. (If you want, say, just content editing, contact us.)

ARE THERE ANY HIDDEN OR ADDITIONAL CHARGES?

Not unless you have hidden or additional requests! For example, if you want a Microsoft Word file for Smashwords (we have to remove formatting to satisfy their requirements!) there is an additional small fee, in the neighborhood of $25. If you want a PDF file suitable for print publication such as with CreateSpace, there is also an additional fee which depends on just how fancy you want the print book to look.

HOW CAN I SAVE MONEY?

It’s easy.  Follow these guidelines to get the best rate:

• If you want us to proofread or copy edit your manuscript, first check it carefully for errors yourself.

  Or get a qualified friend or relative to do it for you; better still, do both.  (“Qualified” doesn’t have to mean “professional.”  It only means that you should find someone who catches lots of errors.)  The fewer mistakes you have in the manuscript, the less it will cost you to have us do the final editing/proofreading. The prices in the calculator above are for the typical material we receive. A book with virtually no errors of the sort found during proofreading could drop the copy editing cost by nearly half.

• Submit your entire project at once.

  That means, don’t forget the cover image, the dedication, the “About the Author,” and anything else that you want to be part of your book but isn’t part of the text.

• Submit your manuscript in the proper format.
  • The document should be in a single file. That means all the extras as well, except for the cover image, which should be in a file of its own.
  • There should be a page break before each new chapter. (That’s a manually inserted page break. Don’t simply add enough carriage returns to force the next chapter onto a new page and think you’ve managed.) And by chapter we mean anything that you want to start a new page in the ebook, including any dedication, acknowledgments, and so forth.
  • There should not be a page break anywhere else.

  See our Document guidelines for more details.