First of all, happy Halloween.
So. I’m in the process of publishing my first trilogy, as you know. Since I was going to be putting a lot of time (it won’t be available until March of ’15) and money (I’m subsidy publishing, so I’m out $2,000) into the project, I thought it would be in my best interest to produce the best possible product in the end. I decided I would look into purchasing line-editing from my publishers.
Then, I found out that to line-edit my whole trilogy would cost me $8,000. In a words “no”. The company admits that is pretty over-priced. A standard line-editing job costs about $2.50 a page, which, for my rather large manuscript comes to around $1,500. That’s a lot, but it isn’t $8,000. If the manuscript wasn’t a whole trilogy even my publishing company’s price might not kill anybody, but when it comes to line editing, here’s a hint.
You know somebody who can do it.
I’ve handed the job over to my parents and siblings. All you have to do to catch typos, misspellings, and obvious grammatical errors is read the manuscript. If you’re not incredibly knit-picky about the subtleties of English grammar, you won’t even need to hire a retired English teacher, (though that’s much easier to do than you think.) The company gave me some valuable information about my books: there’s nothing wrong with the plot structure. Score. All I really needed was line-editing.
So, I’m saving myself anywhere from $1,500 to $8,000 and having my family help out. I think they can get it pretty clean. Check out the Stardrift Trilogy in March to see how this worked out!