Raelene Gorlinsky

Ellora’s Cave, the premier publisher of erotic romance novels, seeks professional copy editors and content/development editors. Pay is per word and checks are issued every other week. Content editor rate is USD $0.0075 cents per word and copy editor pay is $0.00175 per word ($0.0015 per word during training). Book lengths range from 10,000 to 120,000 words.

For copy editors, this equals about $100 for a 60,000 word novel. According to the 2010 Writer’s Market, the lowest acceptable hourly rate for book copy editing is $25/hr. Assuming that you were working 40 hours per week, you would have to get through 10 novel manuscripts per week to make the minimum suggested by Writer’s Market. Even assuming you are able to get through 3 manuscripts per week, you are still getting a (freelance) rate of about $7.50/hr. Once you figure in your self-employment taxes, you’re making well below minimum wage. (The lowest per-page rate recommended by WM is $1/page. Assuming 250 words/page, this is still less than half of the lowest going market rate.)

Now, I realize that on the surface, grammar, correct word usage and fact-checking might not be as important to an erotic novel as, say, to an encyclopedia. But if I might stand on my soapbox for a moment, devaluing good copy editors is insulting to a reader. It suggests that they are not smart enough to be annoyed by typos, consistency errors, and bad spelling.