Why It Takes So Long to Edit a Book

Two general truths about independent authors: 1) they are in a hurry and 2) they don’t have big budgets.

My initial conversation with a prospective author client usually goes something like this:

   Client: Do you think you can edit my book in the next two weeks?

   Me:      It’s possible, but unlikely. Do you have a deadline you need to meet?

   Client: No, but I am so sick of this book. I just want to finish it.

Usually, by the time an independent author is ready to hire an editor, he has done so many rewrites and reads that he just wants someone else to wrap it up, and fast, so he can put it behind him. And he doesn’t want to pay for hours and hours and hours of editing. After all, he’s been working on this book — his baby — for years. It’s got to be 99 percent of the way there, right?

Well.

As a freelance book editor working primarily with independent authors, it took me a while to learn my lesson about quoting time, but after a lot of under-quoting, I finally figured it out. Two weeks is not enough time to thoroughly edit a book. Here’s why:

The editing process for any book is different.

Although some editors can probably claim that they always edit 20 pages in an hour, regardless of the project, I have not found that to be true. A lot of variables can come into play that affect how long each page takes to edit:

• How cleanly it’s written in the first place. Are there lots of spelling mistakes? Grammar snafus? Sentence structure issues?
• Whether the author has done a good job of keeping track of citations and formatting them properly.
• Whether consistent formatting standards have been used throughout the manuscript—for instance, always labeling chapter headers as “header 1” so that it’s easy to create a table of contents.
• Research/fact-checking issues that crop up during the process of editing.

(Sidebar: In order to get your manuscript in the best possible shape before you start to work with an editor, read my previous article 10 Tips to Save You Money on a Book Editor.)

To give my author clients an idea of how long it will take me to edit their manuscripts, and to help them set a budget, I generally edit one “practice chapter” before we commit to the project. This gives both me and the author an idea of whether our styles (both writing and work) are a good fit, and allows me to estimate how long it will take me to edit the entire book.

Before I gained enough experience as an editor, I used to do simple math to predict my editing time. If a chapter took me three hours, and the book had ten chapters, I’d quote the client thirty hours. This almost never worked out as planned.

In addition to the factors I noted above, things always come up during the editing process. In a recent case, halfway through the project, my client remembered that he had written some extra chapters he really wanted to slide into the manuscript. Editing those chapters and making them work within the flow of the existing book took time.

Even if the first round of edits goes exactly as planned, we’re not done.

To properly edit a book, you need at least three rounds of editing.

1. The first tends to be a troubleshooting round of edits to red-flag things that need attention or answers.
2. The second is a line edit that brings the whole thing together.
3. The third is for proofing—making sure there are no typos or formatting mistakes. 

But even once the book has been proofed three times, we’re not there yet. Once an author hands the “finished” manuscript off to a book designer (this is the person who will take a Microsoft Word doc from your editor and actually make it look like a book, with proper margins and exquisitely formatted chapter titles and beautiful fonts and breathtaking white space), the thing needs to be proofed one more time. The editor either proofs the book from the design comp, or from a galley proof provided by the printer. (I always prefer the latter, because it’s actually a copy of the book. If anything goes awry between the Word doc and the actual book, this is where you will catch it.)

I had another client recently who, in an attempt to cut corners, didn’t hire a designer to lay out the book, and didn’t insist upon a galley proof. He simply took the Word doc I gave him and asked the printer to print it as-is. We had done three painstaking rounds of editing on this book, but when he got the first printed book back, he found phrases he wished he had changed, strange formatting issues—and a few typos. Unfortunately, this is just a natural part of the process. Books have a lot of words, and it takes several read-throughs to catch every single thing. Had my client read the galley proof (or had me proof it), we would have caught all of these things before an expensive several-thousand-dollar printing process began.

On my part, I should have insisted on seeing the galley proof, but because my client expressed early on that he only wanted to pay for “one round of edits” (I did push him to two-and-a-half-ish), I took a hands-off approach. This was my mistake. Because while it’s not technically the editor’s job to handhold the author through the entire production process, it’s just good manners.

The process of writing a book is creative, and half the reason you hire an editor is to keep yourself on track with logistics.

So as an editor, it’s my job to make space for all the things that will take longer than you might think they should, and also to respect your creative process.