People often wonder why I don’t offer proofreads as one of my services. The main reason is that I’ve never seen a manuscript ready for proofreading. I’ve accepted a few proofreading jobs in the past fifteen years, and two were my most horrific editing experiences.
My first proofread came to me through another editor who said she had an author who wanted her short fiction to be proofread within ten days. The editor said she’d gone through the book already and didn’t think it needed more than thirty hours of editing. The editor would handle the contract and the fee, so I subcontracted with the editor without looking at the author’s work.
The manuscript arrived the next day, and I was appalled at the horrible state of the book: no commas, no quotation marks around the dialogue, and the sentence structures were a nightmare. This book needed nothing short of a developmental edit. But because the other editor promised the author a proofread in one week, I had to give her the best I could.
Six months later, another editor friend contacted me to tell me she’d found this book in a bargain bin at a small bookstore and bought it because it credited me with editing it. Then this editor asked, “What happened?”
I’d never been so embarrassed in my life. I knew the book was sub-par and vowed to never again give a book less than the edit it needs.
Another time, an editor asked me if I would like to work for the publishing company where she was managing editor. They needed a second proofreader, and I accepted. The first book they sent to me was by an author I knew personally, but I found a myriad of mistakes that weren’t within the scope of a normal proofread. It also contained two lines of garbled and nonsense words. When I returned my “proofread,” I also sent a list of all the things that should have been corrected before it came to me and told them what I did was more than proofreading.
I never heard from them again. Thankfully!
Proofreading is the final stage before submitting a book to an agent or a publisher. Many authors assume that means that if they’re ready to send their book out, then all it needs is a proofread. Not so. A proofread will catch typographical errors, query inconsistencies, and correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
Today, the larger Christian publishing companies send out rejection letters that say the author must get a professional edit before submitting it to them, not a proofread. The editor will look at everything including plot, characterization, showing and telling, and dozens more techniques that publishers want to see in the books they buy.
My best advice to authors is not to seek the cheapest edit you can find. In today’s world of savvy readers, poor writing will come back on you in the form of bad reviews. They could hurt your sales on current and future books.
And to editors who bid on jobs where an author requests a proofread, do a full sample edit before accepting anything. You need to assess whether this manuscript truly is ready for proofreading. Instead of giving the author what they ask for, make sure you show them what their book needs.
Both of you will win in the long run.
