What fees will I be proposing
for writing, editing,
indexing, or Web services
if you are
a big publishing house?
You probably have longstanding guidelines, developed over some years of contracting with freelance editors.
You may find the following points helpful, however, if your existing guidelines for some reason fail to fit our specific case:
- My own experience with big Toronto book publishers suggests that $48.00 Cdn/hr is unrealistically high (I'm worth that much, but what the heck), $24.00 Cdn/hr unrealistically low.
- New York book publishers have historically tended to pay less than their counterparts in Toronto. If I were approached by a New York book house with a fine project (I did have a nibble a few years ago, for significant physics, from a book house which was temporarily having trouble finding the right person in New York; but, alas, we did not get as far as negotiating fees, and since then I have only done a bit of journal-article work for the New York conurbation), I'd go with the prevailing New York book-house rates.
- It is sometimes useful to distinguish the price of editing from the price of indexing. Some publishers pay indexers by the indexable page, rather than by the hour. The page-rate practice should perhaps be encouraged, since it makes it easier to treat objectively similar projects in a similar way, without undue focus on the working styles of individual indexers. Publishers, indexers, and readers all benefit (so I'd argue) from the establishment of uniform, industry-wide project-management expectations, in price even as in quality.
What fees will I be proposing
for writing, editing,
indexing, or Web services
if you are not
a big publishing house?
Flexibility is the governing principle if you are not a big house. More in fear of a sterile intellectual collaboration than of financial losses, I have over the past several years politely turned away two or three private individuals needing assistance with manuscripts. But if your project has conspicuous social or intellectual merit, I'll be happy to work with you for low rates, even (in a truly extreme case) at the Ontario legal minimum wage. (A hypothetical, and extreme, example: You are a lone individual writing a worthy book, on a Greenpeace or Sierra Club or Amnesty International theme. Your intellectual stance does not undermine Catholic moral teaching, does not uncritically exalt the tin gods of Wall Street - among them the sadly misguided purveyors of closed-source software, and of military and surveillance equipment - and does not militate against green public policy or free speech. English is not your first language. You need your English polished, with a judicious mix of editing, outright rewriting, outright English-language private tutoring, and outright literary-composition tutoring, before you can approach publishers. Another hypothetical, and extreme, example: You are a duly qualified individual writing on an unusual scientific topic - let us say, on the construction of amateur radio telescopes. A few hours' preliminary unpaid scrutiny of your manuscript at my desk, and perhaps even at the desk of a colleague or two, suggests your science to be sound. Your English is reasonable. You need a moderate structural-stylistic edit, followed by SGML-to-HTML/TeX/PostScript typesetting.)
What fees will I be proposing
for scientific support services?
You are almost certainly a university faculty member in an astronomy or physics department. Your institution has firm, longstanding guidelines on pay scales for contract workers. We do what your institution has always done (recognizing, cheerfully enough, that your rates are liable to be lower than the freelance editing rates traditionally set by Toronto's bigger book publishers).
Will you be paying me,
in my capacity as a remitter to
the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency,
Canada's seven-percent
Goods and Services Tax (GST)?
Yes, if you are a Canadian institution (whether or not a for-profit business) or a Canadian individual, purchasing services by outside contract rather than through your casual-worker payroll. My business number for GST reporting is 11811 0741 RT.