Fee Schedule

Service

Amount

Copyediting
Moderate to heavy

$60/hour

Very heavy (i.e., rewrite)

$70/hour

Proofreading

$15/hour

Indexing

$4.50/indexable page

Fact-checking

$30/hour

Ghostwriting or cowriting books

100% of advance (min. $20,000) plus 50% of royalties or author’s revenues

Writing book proposals

$1 to $3/word

Web content writing

$60/hour

 

Writing fees do not include marketing services.

Copyediting means line-by-line editing for grammar, style, punctuation, idiom, logical sense, organization, and factual accuracy, and justifying copy to fit a specific style manual (such as Chicago or APA).

Proofreading means line by line editing for grammar, style, and punctuation only, with no attention given to logical thinking, factual accuracy, or major revisions to make citation and documentation fit parameters of a given style manual.

Indexing means having a human being (not a machine) read and index page proofs following the Chicago Manual of Style.

Ghostwriting means writing a document under the client’s name.

Cowriting means writing a document or collaborating on a document’s creation with a client, with byline credit given to the cowriter.

Writing a book proposal means writing a marketable cover letter, proposal, draft table of contents, and chapter outline based on material provided by the author. Rate depends on amount and quality of material provided by the author and the subject matter’s difficulty.

Contact The Copyeditor’s Desk