How long will it take you to edit my manuscript?

How long will it take you to edit my manuscript?

  • Posted by Mark
  • in
  • Tagged with

The length of time will be determined by a number of factors.  First and foremost, your word count.  The longer your manuscript is, the longer it’ll take to work through, so every word can be read in full and not skipped over.  Every piece of punctuation is given attention.  The number of revisions in your sample edit will also determine how long we expect to work on it.

At the end of every editing project, we update a spreadsheet where we enter the initial word count, the date started, the date it reached completion, and the number of revisions made.  The spreadsheet then calculates the total number of revisions and a “words completed per day” calculation is made, which then updates an at-a-glance table.  If the manuscript took a little longer than expected, then the number of days for an edit of that size will be affected, but it might only end up having an hour added on to the expected timescale.  Each newly completed project makes tiny alterations to the timescales within the table, so we can quickly see how long it would take for any given manuscript, based on averages.

For example, a 100,000-word manuscript in tier one (£5 per 1000 words, based on 0-5% of revisions) is expected to take 13 working days, getting through an average of 7692 words per day.  Taking that same manuscript, but applying a tier-four edit (£20 per 1000 words, based on 15-20% of revisions) would have it take around 41 days, with an average of just 2404 words per day.  This level of editing is typically reserved for clients whose manuscripts were translated from another language and therefore require a considerable amount of sentence restructuring.

Taking the first example above of 13 days, but applying that to a smaller manuscript with a higher revision count, our table shows that a 25,000-word manuscript with 10-15% of revisions (a tier-three edit) would take around 12 days, so almost as long as it would take to edit a tier-one manuscript of 100,000 words.  This is why we don’t charge by the hour and don’t charge solely based on word counts.