Haha. Well, no one said you had to accept work from everyone. The more clients you have, the pickier you can be: fewer dinosaur erotica clients.
Ha, true I suppose! I do have a couple of friends I can tap if I get in over my head, and since they’re Canuckistanian I have the exchange rate in my favor ($1 USD = about a bajillionty eleventy five gazillion canuckistanian fun bucks innit). But they work regular 8-5 jobs and don’t read anywhere near as fast as I do (to be fair though, almost nobody does) so the turnaround time would suffer. The quality wouldn’t, though, since I know at least one of them has an actual English degree and teaching experience.
Seriously. Facebook is like all of the worst parts of family holiday dinners and high school reunions spontaneously combined into a Voltron Of Suck. A Voltron Of Suck that resides on the 99th circle of hell, even.
Just a heads up: Effective January first, I’ll be putting a simpler price scheme into place. All services except developmental editing will be a flat $0.01 per word, minimum $50 and rounded up to the nearest dollar. Developmental editing will still be negotiated on a per case basis. People have been telling me that my pricing was complex and hard to follow, and that I was also waaaayyyyyy underpricing my services. Hopefully this will fix that - it’s both easier to understand and it’s still cheaper than the equivalent services by a professional editing shop by far.
Apparently I’m still way underpricing my services. So here’s my final, final price. For now, at least. Developmental will still be negotiated on a case by case basis. Substantive is staying at the same 0.001 per word (minimum $50) rate, since readers will forgive grammar and typos more than a bad story. However, copy edits will be going up to 0.002 per word, minimum $100, effective immediately. I was basing my previous prices on an estimate that a novel released on amazon would make about $400 in the first month. But I’m apparently pretty far off the mark on that and, if it doesn’t completely bomb, it should clear at least $1000 in the first month on KU - even without being high in the listings or have a best seller tag. I do a pretty damn good job and I think that even at 0.002 it’s a good price. My main goal is, as always, to help indie authors out. I don’t want to charge more than the market will bear, I also don’t want to undervalue my services.
Can I lock in the old price for all my books before the prices go up? I kid. I can say that CheshirePhoenix does good work. They have been cleaning up my first 2 books, Last Horizon: Beta and Live. I've been very happy with the amount of issues they have helped find as well as the speed with which they work. I'm already thinking of giving them another book to work on once they finish the current project.
Will keep you in mind when I get something finished. Sounds reasonable. Where are your book reviews? Amazon? Under what name?
@CheshirePhoenix Quick question. Your minimum price doesn't change regardless of how many words I have in a document, does it? I have a manuscript that's at 12k words right now, one I would like edited, but I don't think the words would be enough to justify $50-100 price tags for either option. I also don't want to send it to you right now and then get put in debt for whatever the right amount would be. By the way, that same manuscript is a short story, one I'm working on for a contest entry... you might remember seeing my thread for the Writers of the Future contest. That's the one I'm talking about.
Sorry, but no. The minimum is the bare minimum that I charge for any project - so a 12k word short story would be the same as a 40k word novella.
Thanks. I feel that even a little bit of luck would be appreciated. I'll inform you when I feel like your services will be needed... that way, I'll be ready to pay you, depending on how that will work out.
@CheshirePhoenix I have to ask... why did you edit the prices again? Did you feel you were undercharging still?
