Academic Copyediting Rates: or, What to Expect When Hiring a Copyeditor
It is an unfortunate truth that many authors have misconceptions about how much copyediting costs and how long it takes. This section is an explanation of what authors should expect when hiring a copyeditor independently.
     First, few academic copyeditors are going to charge an individual less than $25 an hour. Copyeditors in other fields are used to earning $35 to $100 an hour so you are getting a good deal if a copyeditor charges you anything under $30 an hour. (When I was still hiring myself out as a copyeditor--I don't anymore so please don't ask--I charged $75 an hour so you are lucky you don't have to hire me!)
     Second, to do a thorough job of copyediting an academic manuscript, copyeditors edit from 2 to 5 pages an hour. A page is defined as 250 words, which is what a one-inch-margin, double-spaced, twelve-point-font page usually comes out to. Manuscripts with many problems will slow a copyeditor down to a page an hour, or even half a page; clean manuscripts may go as fast as 8 pages an hour. Copyeditors usually move through a book more quickly than an article because they get used to what kinds of mistakes you make. Also, just setting up to edit a manuscript takes two or three hours, which gets amortized over the course of a whole book but not an article. In general, the average rate at which copyeditors edit is 4 pages (or 1,000 words) per hour.
     So, the bottom line here is that a 30-page article will cost you at least $150 and maybe as much as $750. In general, you should expect to pay around $250. A full-length book of 500 pages will cost you at least $2,000 and may go as high as $12,500. You should expect to pay around $4,000.
     Many authors are shocked to learn how much copyediting costs. While they may understand that good academic copyeditors are highly educated (often with doctorates), have developed wide ranges of knowledge, and deserve a decent wage for their professional skills, authors may still balk at paying $250 for an article or $4,000 for a book.
     Let me point out one thing, however. It's true that hundreds of dollars is no small thing for starving students or untenured faculty, even for those who are regularly buying $5 lattes (you know who you are!). It is a small thing, however, if you think of it as an investment. A well-edited article will most likely do better in the submission process at a first-rate journal with a high rejection rate. Since publication in good journals leads to jobs, tenure, and promotions, good copyediting can lead directly to you making more money a year. Sometimes it is the very people who think little of paying $400 for a suit to wear to job interviews who consider $400 too much to invest in their writing.
     So, how do you know if you would benefit from copyediting? My belief is that anyone can benefit. We all have blind spots and can learn much from corrections to our consistent errors. If you have never had a professional copyedit and are planning to send a precious article out for review, think about hiring a copyeditor just for the learning experience. If you are not a native speaker of English, or you have been told by instructors or colleagues that your work could benefit from copyediting, hire a copyeditor before sending work to a publisher. If your article suffers from poor grammar and awkward constructions, such errors may prevent your work from receiving a fair review.
     If you have decided that you would like to make this investment, no doubt you want to get the best value for your money. To do so, I recommend that you do the following. First, review the manuscript you would like copyedited. Make sure that it is clean. If your footnotes have never been spell-checked, spell-check them. If your references are not standardized, fix them. You do not want to pay someone else to fix things you could easily have fixed yourself. Second, once you have fixed what you can, identify exactly how many pages are in your manuscript (don't guess, divide the total electronic word count by 250 words). Divide this figure by 4 (pages an hour) to arrive at the likely total cost of copyediting. That way you won't be surprised. Third, ask around to find out if anyone you know has worked with a good copyeditor. (You can also e-mail me and ask me for the names of good copyeditors. I have a list of people who have passed a copyediting test.) Many academic copyeditors now have websites, so you can search for them on-line as well. If possible, pick an academic copyeditor who is familiar with your field and its conventions.
     Once you have identified someone you want to work with, give the copyeditor clear instructions about what kind of edit you want. There are four kinds of editing: technical editing, style editing, correlation editing, and substantive editing. Each one of these is described in Some Copyediting Terms. Substantive editing is the most time-consuming and also the most valuable. If you struggle with English grammar, I recommend asking a copyeditor for a technical edit and a substantive edit. If you are pretty confident about your grammar and spelling, you can ask for only a substantive edit. You can also ask for a style edit if your manuscript simply must be submitted in the publisher's format, but most people can put a document into a particular style if they really study the submission guidelines, so this is a place to save yourself money in advance.
     Finally, if you are having the copyeditor edit a book-length manuscript, have him or her edit one chapter and send it to you so you can review the changes before going farther. If the copyeditor found standard errors, you may even be able to correct these before sending the rest of the manuscript to him or her.

If you need to find a freelance copyeditor, please see my copyediting home page. I no longer copyedit myself.