What is the price of perfection? When you pay for professional editing, shouldn’t you be assured that your book will be error-free? Accuracy rates for professional editors today are quite high. Yet language and the art of writing don’t lend themselves to a strictly formulaic approach, and reader-reported errors and fumbles that creep in during revisions don’t necessarily point to poor editing. Here’s how to strike a balance between unreasonable expections and professional standards.

Is demanding perfection realistic?

Editing is as much an art as it is a science. Even so, most professions work within accepted accuracy rates, and editing is no different. A 95 percent accuracy rate makes a respectable benchmark for editing, according to several experts cited in a well-documented discussion of editorial error rates. That sounds like a reasonable benchmark to me—and for many books, it might be.

But what about your book? Should you expect to find 5 percent of the errors left in? To gain some perspective, consider the heavy line edit I did last year for a first-time author on a book that started out at well over 150,000 words. The edit generated 33,310 revisions.

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This is a fantastic article written by fiction editor Lisa Poisso. She echos in a succinct way, my feelings exactly.

She touches on:

• industry standards
• basic types of edits
• how to reduce errors after an edit
• how different editors work
• how “keeping costs down” might affect efficiency 

To read the entire article, click HERE.

And Happy Editing 🙂

Categories: Editing

Tags: editing advice, editing tip, editor, errors, expectations, Lisa Poisso, professional editing