Self publishing editing services: what’s worth paying for and what isn’t?

[Ella Marsh]

My manuscript is almost done, and now I’m staring at the editing question with no clear idea where to begin. After weeks of reading blog posts and comparing quotes, I’m more confused than when I started, so I figured real experiences from this community would help more than another sales page.

While researching self publishing editing services, I came across Pacific Press Publishing and read through what they offer. It made me wonder how their approach compares with hiring a freelancer directly or going through a marketplace. If any of you have worked with them, or with a similar company, I’d love to hear how it went.

A few things I’m still trying to sort out:

Do you actually need all three rounds? Developmental editing, copyediting and proofreading each come with their own price tag, and together the total gets scary. If you’ve published, did you pay for everything, or did you find a smaller combination that still gave you a clean, professional book?

How do you tell a great editor from a good salesperson? Plenty of websites look impressive, but that doesn’t tell me much about the quality of the actual work. Did you ask for a sample edit first? And how many pages is it reasonable to ask for before it starts feeling like a free service?

What does fair pricing look like? Quotes for the same word count vary wildly. Some charge per word, some per hour, and others offer a flat project fee. If you’re comfortable sharing numbers, I’d be curious what you paid and whether it felt worth it once the book was out.

How much time should I plan for? I don’t want to rush, but I also don’t want to sit around for months waiting on someone’s calendar to open up.

And lastly, what warning signs should I watch for? I’ve read stories about editors who vanished halfway through or returned a manuscript that looked like it only went through spellcheck.

Any advice, good or bad, is welcome. Stories about editors you’d recommend to anyone are great, and so are the lessons you learned the hard way.

Thanks for reading!

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