On Fiverr

If you are an independent writer, and you’re chucking self-edited works into the marketplace, then you should be ashamed. Professional editors are some of the easiest things in the world to find. Here’s what you do:

1. Go to Fiverr.
2. Search for Editing.
3. Pay around five bucks per 2,000 words you have to edit.
4. Release a book free of typos and stupid grammatical errors.
5. Retire to your own private island.

Fiverr is a website for quick and dirty jobs done cheap. Most of the editors on the site want to work a quick job, make a few bucks, and move on. The ads all proclaim quick turn around on small jobs, but the first step in each transaction is contacting the seller to let them know what you want. You can always ask for more or less, and negotiate terms on your budget and timescale.

For my work, time was not of the essence, so the message sent to my preferred editor was a request for a little more editing done at a much slower rate. In my case it was edit 12,000 words over a week at a ‘buy five get one free’ rate. Of the two editors priced this way, one was going on vacation and wasn’t taking orders over 2,000 words, and the other accepted within eight hours. Deal.

How do you pick an editor? Maybe one editor is as good as another – I’m new at this, so what do I know? I’ll tell you what: my story is a fast-paced men’s adventure yarn, so I waded through a lake of women and soft jawed gentlemen to find a couple of blokes who looked like they’d maybe seen the ugly end of a punch at least once in their lives.

That may not be fair, and may be a bit sexist, but for a quick job like this, it’s as good a reason as any. In the end, that strategy worked out great. The editing was solid, and professional, and he will be getting more work from me in the future.

His name is daveyboy312005.  Here’s his Fiverr profile. If you have any editing work, you should throw it his way – you won’t regret it.

Sidebar: No blog posts were edited in the creation of this blog.  I pay for editing only when I charge for my writing.