Editor Experiences

My experience with editors has had its ups and downs. This post is a continuation of what I posted earlier about writers and editors. I hope this helps with some of you curious to know where that rant came from.

I remember with Horizon I had specifically gone to certain friends and family that could give me feedback on the story. I mostly picked people who were interested in the genre because that was my target audience. What I didn’t realize was I pulled in an older audience that I didn’t expect because I wanted it to be targeted towards 18-40 year olds.

I met someone at my day job at the time who heard about my book and she offered her editing services. Well, like any author I asked how much? She charged me $2.50 a page because I had the book edited up pretty well in her opinion. (She had been working with another author that she needed to work with a lot to the point where she almost have up.) Anyways, she had only positive critiques and very few negative critiques. In her opinion, she felt like I polished it up really well. So I decided okay, everybody has said it sounds good and I’m ready to publish.

This is where I made the mistake. I should’ve given myself a little more time because I still had a few errors near the end and one or two at the beginning that were missed. I went back and scoured the pages looking for the mistakes and took care of them. Well, a week later I get more messages about more mistakes. So at this point I’ve lost it, I just spent almost $600 on editing, and I’m still editing stuff that was simple mistakes that my editor neglected to mark. Then, I get a call from my editor tossing the blame on me for not taking her suggestions to heart. Now, I’m just baffled by what she is saying to me, so I tell her fine. I’m done!

I could’ve smoothed that over a little better but I was furious about her blaming me for something that she didn’t tell me when she edited. I still have the edits she did and still have yet to find the marks she claimed she marked on my work. Anyways, I don’t have her number anymore or want her help anymore cause I wasted money on a service I thought was going to be great.

My second experience was with my book Eversoul the sequel to Horizon. I was searching for a new editor and found one that was referred to me. I called her talked to her and found out she had a friend that works with her cause she does the grammar and her friend does the phrasing and story critique. So I said okay, how much? She asks me what my former editor charged, I told her $2.50 a page. So we agreed on that. I sent her the chapters and they edited it real quick

I receive a text from her wanting to do a Skype chat so I agree. Little did I know that it would be both of them talking to me. So we go through the edits but after four hours of skyping and listening to them talk about their days with each other, I got over it quick. I told them I had to go eat and they said oh we were going to go over these edits till 10pm. I said, we’ve been talking for four hours and we haven’t even gotten to chapter one cause I had a prologue.

After that wasted time, I turned my back on them because I don’t need to be wasting time and money on a gossip session about movies and actors.

I stopped writing for six months because of depression, hardships, and  no motivation. I became a hermit. Went to work, came home, and went to bed. I didn’t care about  anything.

I recently remembered my aunt editing my very first novel. Critiqued it very well and helped me alot with fundamentals. I decided to go back to her with my new novel The Temperament Scepter because she has more experience in writing than I do. I trust her because she knows how important this is to me. Plus, my fiance suggested I go to her too, but I felt like I was bothering her. To my surprise, she welcomed the idea and now she’s going over my novel. We haven’t talked about pricing but she didn’t bother to tell me. She’s more excited to help me than worry about that. I’ll see how her edits are soon and keep you guys updated, but so far, I’m extremely excited to work with my aunt again.