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***There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart***
I'm terribly sorry, Elfwreck, but you have no idea of what goes into editing. A 'couple of hours of basic editing', 'Six-ten hours to make them coherent and readable'? (Is that all you expect from a book -- coherent and reqadable?)
A careful read for assessment only of an average length novel will take ten or twelve hours.
If it's good enough for editing, it then comes down to the 'how long is a piece of string?' principle.
Few manuscripts can move with a line edit or even with a good copy edit. A light edit over and above copy edit will take twenty-thirty professional working hours.
Many manuscripts -- the vast majority in the case of first-timers -- will need heavy work and sometimes will involve hundreds of working hours. Bits and pieces presented as fact must also be thoroughly checked along the way. Also there's the vital question of continuity which many authors screw up terribly: someone described as tall you might find several chapters later struggling to reach a can of beans on a supermarket shelf.
This work, of course, is often spread over a matter of many months as updates to drafts and made to produce new master working copies of an ms, because the author is part of the editing process and must, himself, make changes and develop and re-structure as per his editor's advice.
This new author input itself is often flawed and needs more editing and rewriting and resulting adjustment to other parts of the manuscript. To save time, it is not at all unusual for an editor to write new passages or even chapters himself. I do that more often than I like to, but many authors dealing with an editor for the first time run out of steam during the editorial process and prefer to hand over much of the donkey work.
And after all that you've got careful proof reading of the polished final edited draft before print. This involves several hawk-eyed people. Most will move almost as fast as they might with a recreational read, so let's say eight hours for this job.
Then the bound proof (the ARC) arrives from the printer and must be painstakingly proofed again for typos and print-generated error, looking for such simple things as a reversed apostrophe or a hard-to-spot double space between words. That takes about the same as a pre-print proof read.
And still mistakes will slip through the net. At the bigger houses, largely because the editor doesn't get involved in the closing stages and the clean-up is left to inexperienced assistants or even untrained interns.
By the way, an ebook should go through exactly this process with the exception of proof reading the bound proof hard copy. What you should do instead is to proof read each format version. There are so many of those these days (nine, I think) that we rely on third party conversion (say through Smashwords) cannot check what would amount to 900 versions of books in our current SW catalogue (9,000 hours?), and can only guarantee our own PDFs and ePub that is converted and proofed in house.
It's a tough old job, Elfwreck, and it takes time. My two associate editors and I have well over a century of experience behind us as professional writers and editors and we manage to publish just twelve novels a year, working long, long hours and with only the best authors we come across.
Now do you see that two to hours working on an ms from an amateur is a tad less than realistic? Even reading through the twenty or so submitted synopses and sample chapters we receive every week takes much, much longer than that -- just to reject/decline in all but a tiny percentage of cases.
Best wishes. Neil
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