On Free Editing
TL:DR If you can’t afford a human editor, ChatGPT is a legitimate option. (But pony up the $20.)
Brought to you by Tsundoku: The practice of piling up books to save for later.
My mission in life is to facilitate “more good books by more good people” so when someone reaches out I try to help as much as I can.
A guy emailed me earlier in the year asking for some advice on his manuscript, so I gave it a read and made some general suggestions. He emailed me a couple days ago and it looks like he made an effort to implement it and the manuscript does look a lot better. The problem is it is still in need of editing. Like all the editings—structural, line, copy, and proofreading—and he says he has no money to pay someone to do it.
For my aspiring book editors: There’s a time to work for free, and books are not it. It takes too long to get to the end of the project, and you need to get to the end because the value in working for free is that glowing testimonial.
Even if you’re just getting started with book editing, it is an advanced skill and you should get paid something. I think I got paid $12,000 over six months for my first book, back when I was still doing PR. That was 20 years ago (gulp). My average commission now is 8x that. And no one complains because I understand the assignment and I know the book my client and I create is capable of delivering on its goal.
But, I digress. Back to my guy.
Honestly, his only alternative given where he is in life is to put the whole thing, chapter by chapter, through ChatGPT, preferably the paid version.
To make sure this would forward his agenda, I put in a little bit of the text from his manuscript to see what would come back. And it was so much better than what went in that I felt very confident in recommending this approach.
Will it replace a human editor? No. There will be structural disconnects and inconsistencies but it will be readable. What I know from experience is that if the content is unique and interesting enough it will survive the imperfect execution.
It’ll be done and he’ll be happy and some people will probably buy it. And maybe he’ll discover how he can use ChatGPT to create more stuff he can offer for sale that will allow him to generate revenue so that perhaps one day he can afford to hire a human to take it all to the next level.
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