Hub has been approached to edit an academic book (quantum mechanics) designed for graduate students. The author is Russian writing in English, so the text might need significant revision wrt to English grammar, spelling and syntax.
How much would you charge? The professor has asked hub how much he expects to be paid. Would you charge per page? Per hour? Some amount for the whole project? The book is 100 pages and is very complex scientifically, so that should be considered, too.
Any ideas?
My wife is a professional translator who sometimes does revision. for translation, she charges 22-25 cents (Canadian) per word. And that includes l’ that some clients try to cheat her out of (that sometimes requires more thought that straight text because the French articles are used quite differently from English–but I digress). For revision–editing really–she charges $55-60 per hour. The rates vary according to difficulty of the text and the shortness of the deadline. She once did an entire book that had been translated by a French speaker (not usually a good idea, but it was a personal friend of the author and doubtless did it real cheap) and she charged $2500 for 50 hours although she probably spent more than that. She also got an original print as a gratuity. The book was a biography of an artist by his wife. We have no idea what the print is worth, but it is framed and hanging in our living room.
Anyway, by the hour is best for this sort of work. Then if your husband has to spend a lot of time, he will be compensated. If the author doesn’t trust his honesty, I would advise to tell him to go elsewhere unless you really need the money.
You must see the book before agreeing to anything. It’s usually best to quote by the hour. It can be very hard to estimate how long it will take you if you haven’t done it before.
This sounds like a very complex book to edit. You have the translation aspect, the grammar and style aspect and the scientific aspect. I would not be pricing myself lightly if I took that book on. Go for as much as the market will bear because I guarantee you it will take longer than your partner can imagine.
I would quote someone at least 100 dh an hour for subbing - which is quite a cheap rate - and probably around US$30.
Adding in the technical skilled aspect I would think he shouldn’t do it for less than US$50 an hour. Possibly more.
Thanks for your advice. The author isn’t paying for the editing, his department is, so we’ll see what they say. Hub is going to propose 1000E (remember, it’s only 100pgs) and see what response he gets.
I’m sure they’ve done this before, so I wish they’d just make him an offer first and let him negotiate from there.
I currently work for a couple textbook writers. I do editing, reviewing, writing, you name it, I do it.
A couple questions:
Is your husband editing or reviewing? At least in my neck of the industry, “editing” is more grammar/spelling/wording type of work. IE, taking the basic content and making it clear and concise. This requires a lot of English and tech writing skills, but not much technical/scientific skills.
Reviewing, on the other hand, involves getting someone who knows the material to look at the book and make sure it’s technically and scientifically correct.
It sounds as if they want your husband to do both, which is quite odd unless he has a background in tech writing. I’m guessing he doesn’t, because if he did he would know what to charge. Even with good English skills, editing isn’t something you just jump into and do - there’s a certain flair to tech writing that just takes a certain amount of time to learn how to do. I’ve been doing this for about a year and a half, and I’m just beginning to feel competent as a writer/editor.
Typically, the textbook publisher will provide an editor to go over the book for grammer and syntax changes. Does this professor have an publisher for the book already?
Sending the book out to other people in the industry for a technical review is fairly common. I’ve done this a couple times, and I got paid by chapter - around $100 per chapter, and each chapter was about 50-100 pages. It was a technical review of a low level computer textbook, so it required some tech knowledge but not graduate-level quantum physics. I would guess your husband could get more based on the fact that there’s probably very few people who can do the job.
Athena,
Excellent advice! Thanks.
Let me clarify one point about the book. It’s a book only being published at the university for graduate students, like a study guide or abridged version of a much larger text. So, I’m assuming that means that the science is correct (though hub could correct most of it if necessary). It’s just a matter of ‘fixing’ his English.
I appreciate this info and I might get him onto some scientific publishers to see if he can get some small projects to enhance his income!
The minimum I’ve ever heard of for simple proofreading and minor editing is $20 an hour. I suspect your husband should ask for more than that.
Thanks, Cranky. The money he earns from that will buy us a new DVD player! Yay!
What do you make of this? This is what he has most recently written with regards to the details of the assignment. It’s gibberish to me, but it might make sense to you guys.
If not, at least you’ll have a laugh. It’s (I think) a description of the quantity of text.
To be precise, I speak about approximately 450 pages, 42 lines each, with 60 characters in each line.
It makes 1.134. 000 characters, including to this volume the formula and 150 pictures.
To my knowledge, the main unity in publishing business is so called printed page, somewhat around 22 typewriter pages. Usually the prises are given for this unity. For example my first book had 19,5 printed pages, which corresponded to 310 book pages. The book we are speaking now will probably have 30 printed pages, which is about 450 book pages.
He really, really needs your help, that’s for sure…
Naw, it’s gibberish to me as well.
If I were your husband, I’d try for a straight hourly rate. If the book is anything like the assignment description you posted, your husband better have a LOT of free time. Try for something in the range of $20-$40/hour. Hell, go for more, if they’re willing. But I think $20-$40 is typical of this type of work.
Some things for your husband to think about before he starts:
Consistency: This is one of the most important things to think about. Decide on a style and keep it the same throughout the book. Think about how he’ll do stuff like alternative definitions (ie: “The File Allocation Table, also known as FAT” vs “The File Allocation Table (FAT)” vs “The File Allocation Table, or FAT”) and capitolization. If a word is capitalized one place in the text, make sure it’s capitalized everywhere.
Another tip: try for fewer words used in a clear, consice manner. I find that many beginning tech writers (me included) tend to put extra words in a sentence thinking it makes things more clear. Hell, I sometimes even put whole sentences in! Try to edit out things like:
“The Web provides many links to FAQs, tutorials, and other information of interest to beginning tech writers” reads much better as “The Web provides links to FAQs, tutorials, and other information of interest to beginning tech writers.”
Also watch your wording. I first wrote that example as “The Web provides resources for beginning tech writers” but then you get into questions like “what do I mean by resources?” and “does the Web really provide those resources, or does it just provide links to resources that people have published on the Web.” In fact, I would probably end up rewriting that whole sentence to something like “A beginning tech writing can find FAQs, tutorials, and other helpful information on the Web.”
Another hint: You almost never need to start a sentence with “There”. ie “There are many resources on the Web for beginning tech writers.” It sounds cludgy, and adds extra words to the sentence. 99% of the time it can be edited out and the sentence flows better.
What else? Make sure your punctuation is correct. I’m currently reviewing a set of documents where the writer put in commas, just about everywhere. Like I’m demonstrating, here. He also really liked colons and semicolons; they’re almost always useless.
Anyway, that’s probably more information than you needed. Good luck to your husband - tech writing is a really good way to find out that what you thought were good writing skills could use some work. There’s a lot of people on this board MUCH more experienced than I who could probably give better tips, so if he needs any help, I’m sure he’ll find some!
Athena (“The Straight Dope is a good resource for beginning tech writers”)
Excellent really valuable advice, Athena. I’ve forwarded hub the url for this thread. Hopefully, he won’t do more investigative work and see my dumb MPSIMS threads. 
(Joking, dear.)