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20da88f0
Community Member

Developmental editing on Manuscript inquiry

How long to do a developmental editing on 70,000 words of fiction-memoir Manuscript? As of now he is taking approx. 1 month for 1st milestone of 7000 k words.

 

And how to stop upwork notification email from this discussion?

5 REPLIES 5
colettelewis
Community Member

Mun it really does depend on how much work is required. Developmental editing is one of the most advanced forms of editing and generally requires a huge amount of work. However, a month seems a long time for 7000 words. Has the freelancer been communicating with you during this time? Normally, developmental editing requires a lot of input from the author. 

prestonhunter
Community Member

I hired Janice, Sandra, and David to do a developmental editing on 70,000 words of fiction-memoir Manuscript.

 

Janice took 2 weeks. Sandra took 1 month. David took 2 months.

All of them provided identical levels of quality and all of them cost the same amount.

 

For my next project, I only hired Janice. Because she was the fastest.

Preston, there is no such thing as identical editing - and as I have already said, the time taken depends on a lot of factors - particularly in developmental editing. So your reasons for hire fall away. 

Nichola:
I agree with you.

 

The only point of my post was that it is not possible to ask for precise numbers about how long this will take, because it depends on many factors, including who you hire. And it depends on how much time they spend on the task. Results will vary.

It would be cool if you could plug the original poster's numbers into a formula and tell him that the task should take 13 days. But nobody can do that.

 

A client certainly can not compare how fast their freelancer is working if they only hire one freelancer. I am not recommending hiring multiple freelancers for a task such as this. But if a client wants to be able to compare, that is what he would need to do: Hire multiple freelancers, and compare their cost, quality, speed, etc.

 

Janice is not ACTUALLY "faster" than Sandra. But Janice worked on this project 8 hours per day, while Sandra only worked on the project 4 hours per day. That is why Janice seemed to be twice as fast as Sandra, even though the two of them were identical in their ability.

 

==================

Anyway: If the original poster is wondering how I was able to get the project done on time and on budget in this thought experiment, it's simple:


I divided the 70,000 manuscript into 10 milestones.

I hired 4 freelancers to do the same job. I gave them the same assignment.

After each of them turned in their work fo the first milestone, I evaluated their work carefully.

(Well, I evaluted 3 submissions, because one never turned in anything, and I got a refund for the milestone payment, because the freelancer just disappeared.)

I evaluted the work of 3 freelancers, and I decided which one provided me with the combination of speed, quality, and value that I needed.

Then I funded additional milestones for and continued working with ONE of the freelancers, and fired the others.

Your evaluation doesn't carry any weight because you are making up scenarios. The OP wanted to know if it was normal to take a month to do a developmental edit on 7000 words. While I think that is rather a long time, we do not know what that developmental edit entailed. So please, don't muddy the waters. 

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