About My Line Editing

My services as a line editor are severely limited at this time. Should my other ventures succeed, I will certainly attempt to do more in this field.

As you have entered this page, perhaps you are curious about line editing. “What is it?” you may ask. “How is it different from copy editing?”

Simply put, it’s far more thorough. A copy editor will go through the manuscript and simply clean up grammatical errors. Punctuation, capitalization, that sort of thing.

A line editor does those and then some. Besides spot-checking the grammar, a line editor will read through the entire manuscript carefully, sentence by sentence, and polish up anything that seems askew. Disorderly clauses, wonky paragraphing, adjusted verbiage. A line editor’s job isn’t properly done until the manuscript is perfect. Or, at least, as close to it as is reasonably and humanly possible.

A bold claim, to be sure, but that’s the gist of it.

So, then, the next question would be “how much does something like that cost?” A fair question, indeed, and one I’ve had to ponder, myself.

A copy edit will generally run for much cheaper, obviously. That runs about 2-3 cents per word. It will take more for a rush job, obviously.

A line edit can range anywhere from 3-9 cents per word, but the median looks to be 4-5 cents. Personally, I’ll just stick with the lower middle-of-the-road cost of 4 cents per word for a novel.

If you’d like to have something shorter than that line edited, I’ll tackle a novella for about 3 cents per word and short stories for about 2 per.

That said, if you’re interested in having your work line edited but you’re on a tighter budget than that, feel free to reach out. If you can catch my interest with your story’s premise and a sample, I’m not above giving discounts if the work is enjoyable.

If that all sounds good to you, contact me either

here or through my Fiverr page.