Someone would post a job - “I need someone to copy edit an 80K-word manuscript” - and a hundred other freelancers would scramble over each other to offer them the best deal. Both Upwork and Freelancer felt like races to the bottom. Despite the fact that I could barely afford basic living essentials and was constantly exhausted from overwork, Fiverr made me feel like I was charging too much. The editors surrounding me were charging as low as 0.1 cents a word, or $100 to fully edit a 100,000-word manuscript. Getting paid 0.5 cents a word is less than minimum wage, but because of how competitive things were at Fiverr, I felt like I was entitled for charging that much. But if you’re getting clients from Fiverr, trust me: the text is not polished.
It takes about an hour to professionally edit 1,000 words, maybe 1,500 words if you’re quick and the text isn’t too unpolished.
I stuck mainly to Fiverr, where after six months of accumulating five-star reviews, I finally felt confident enough to charge $0.005 per word to developmentally edit people’s manuscripts.įor those who don’t know much about editing, getting paid $500 to work on a 100,000-word manuscript (about the length of a 400-page paperback) might sound like a good deal. In my junior year of college when I first decided to start looking for work as a freelance editor, I got a lot of terrible advice and ended up in some marketplaces that weren’t a good fit.
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