What does it cost to have a novel edited?

With us, a development edit of a novel costs 3 cents per word and a line edit costs 3.5 cents per word, so an 80,000-word novel comes to $2,400 for the development edit or $2,800 for the line edit. We also offer a $50 quick edit on your first 10 pages, and $350 for four pages of notes on a screenplay. The rest of this page is what moves those numbers, how other editors price, and what to ask before you hire anyone.

Our current rates

Service	What you get	Rate
Free Twitch edit	Live development edit on stream, publicly archived	Free
Quick edit	One page of private notes on your first 10 pages	$50
Private development edit (novel or other prose)	Video plus full written development notes	3 cents per word
Private development edit (screenplay)	Video plus 4 pages of written notes	$350
Line edit	Video plus line-by-line markup	3.5 cents per word
Writing coaching	A call covering story world, character and prose	Ask us
Writing contracting	Scoped per project, from screenplays to prose fiction to video games	Quoted per project

Rates as of October 2026. Turnaround depends on length and our schedule, so tell us your deadline and we'll give you a date when we quote.

The Get Edits page has the full descriptions and how to send us your work.

What actually drives the price

1. Word count

This is the dominant factor, and it isn't quite linear. A long book costs more for the obvious reason, but it can also cost disproportionately more for developmental work, because the editor has to hold the whole structure in their head at once. Continuity, pacing and arc problems get harder to track as length grows. Sentence-level work scales much more evenly, since a line edit is roughly twice the work for twice the words. That's why per-word pricing is common for line and copy work and a little awkward for developmental work.

2. Depth of edit

The four edit types are different amounts of labor per page, so they're priced differently for the same manuscript. As a general tendency developmental work is the most expensive and proofreading the least, though prices vary by editor (at our rates a line edit runs half a cent per word above a development edit, and it comes as a line-by-line markup rather than a set of notes). If you don't know which one you need, read the comparison piece before you ask anyone for a quote. Asking for a quote on the wrong service is how people end up with the wrong edit.

3. Condition of the manuscript

Most editors quote after seeing a sample, and this is why: two manuscripts of identical length can take very different amounts of time. What slows an edit down, and so tends to raise the price:

Heavy comma and dialogue-punctuation problems (a copy editor is fixing every line rather than every tenth line).
Inconsistent formatting, tracked changes left in, or comments from earlier readers still embedded.
A lot of invented terminology with no glossary.
Non-native-English prose that needs rewriting rather than correcting. That's a legitimate service, and it's substantially more work than a copy edit.
Research-heavy material that needs checking.

If an editor quotes without reading a sample, they're either quoting high to protect themselves or they're about to be unpleasantly surprised. Neither helps you.

4. Turnaround

Rush work costs more across the industry, and editing is no exception. A good editor's calendar is often booked weeks or months ahead, so "I need it in ten days" means somebody's weekend, and many will charge a rush fee or just say no. The reverse is also true and underused: if you're flexible on dates, say so. Filling a gap in a schedule is worth something to the editor, and it's reasonable to ask whether it's worth something to you.

5. Genre and form

Some material takes longer per thousand words. Secondary-world fantasy and hard science fiction carry a continuity and terminology load. Interactive narrative and game scripts are priced differently again, because the "manuscript" is a branching structure that can't be read once, linearly, and there's a whole piece on why. Screenplays are usually quoted per page or per project rather than per word, because page count is the industry's unit.

How editors structure pricing

Per word. A rate multiplied by your word count. It's predictable, because you know the total before you start, and it's the most common structure for line and copy editing. Check whether it's your actual count or a rounded-up one, and whether it uses the manuscript-page convention (250 words to a page) or the real count.

Per hour. Common with experienced editors and with copyediting. It's honest, because a clean manuscript really does take less time, but the total is open-ended, so ask for an estimated range and a cap. A professional can give you both after seeing a sample. A faster, more experienced editor at a higher hourly rate is often cheaper overall than a slower one at a lower rate.

Flat fee per project. One number for the whole job, usually after a sample read. It's best for budgeting and common for developmental work and scripts. Make sure the fee states exactly what's included: how many pages of notes, how many rounds, and whether follow-up questions are covered.

Per page. Standard for screenplays, where a page is a real, standardized unit, and occasionally used for prose with the 250-words-per-page convention. For prose, confirm which definition of "page" is in play, because formatting can change the count a lot.

Warning signs: a price quoted instantly with no sample read, a price far below everyone else's, or a package that bundles developmental, line, copy and proofread into one pass. The last one sounds like a bargain but describes a job that can't be done in one pass, because each stage assumes the previous one is finished.

What a good editor will ask before quoting

Having these ready will get you a real number faster, from us or anyone else:

Word count. The actual one, from the actual file.
Genre and comparable titles.
Which edit you think you need. It's fine to say you don't know.
What stage the draft is at. First complete draft, or fifth? Has it been through beta readers or a writing group?
What you want out of it. Querying agents, self-publishing next month, or learning to write better. These produce different notes.
Your deadline, and whether it's real.
A sample, typically the first chapter plus one from the middle. The middle one matters more than people expect, because openings are the most polished part of a manuscript and tell an editor the least.

Is it worth it?

It depends on what you do with the notes. An edit doesn't improve your book. It's information about your book, and the improvement comes from the months of your own work afterwards. A writer who gets a developmental edit and then revises for six months gets a lot out of it. A writer who gets the same edit, feels bad, and shelves the manuscript paid the same money and got nothing.

So the cheapest useful thing to do first is watch one. Our free edits are public on Twitch and the blog, and there's an example of the written notes from a paid edit. Watch somebody else take the notes, see whether you'd find them useful, and then decide.

Getting a quote

Tell us your word count, genre and a sample through the Get Edits page and we'll tell you what it costs. If you're still working out which edit you need, start with the manuscript assessment explainer.