To become an editor, pick one kind of editing and one market, learn the style manual that market uses, and practice until you can explain every change you make. Then prove it: with a publisher's editing test, a sample edit for a client, or a set of before-and-after pages. Salaried editors often start as editorial assistants, writers or reporters, and the typical requirement is a bachelor's degree. Freelancers are hired on a passed test and good samples, and the usual first rung is copy editing.
The four kinds of editing
“Editor” covers four jobs that happen in a fixed order. A manuscript gets its developmental edit first, because there is no point polishing a chapter that is about to be cut. Line editing follows, then copy editing, and proofreading happens last, on the typeset pages.
| Level | What it fixes | What you hand back |
|---|---|---|
| LevelDevelopmental | What it fixesStructure, plot or argument, what's missing | What you hand backAn edit letter and margin notes |
| LevelLine editing | What it fixesSentences: clarity, rhythm, word choice | What you hand backTracked changes and comments |
| LevelCopy editing | What it fixesErrors, consistency, house style | What you hand backTracked changes, queries, a style sheet |
| LevelProofreading | What it fixesTypos and layout errors on final proofs | What you hand backMarked-up proof pages or PDF |
Book, news or content
The second choice is the market, and each has its own manual and rhythm. At large book publishers, an in-house editor's job is mostly acquiring books and guiding them through the house. Much of the copy editing and proofreading goes to freelancers, hired by a managing or production editor. News and magazine editors work on a copy desk to AP style, with deadlines measured in hours. Content editors plan and edit a company's blog, newsletters and web pages for accuracy, brand voice and search. Academic, medical and technical editing pay a premium for subject knowledge.
If you have no strong pull, start with copy editing. It has the clearest standard (the manual is either followed or not), publishers hire freelancers for it, and it trains the sentence-level judgment that line and developmental work depend on. Proofreading is the other common way in, and the guide to becoming a proofreader covers that path.
One paragraph, edited three ways
The levels are easiest to tell apart on a real page. Here is a short draft from a novel, followed by what each editor would do with it. For comparison, all three work on the same draft.
Marguerite had always hated the lighthouse, ever since she was a little girl. She climbed the 114 steps slowly, her heart was pounding in her chest. At the top stood her brother Tomas, who she hadn't seen in eleven years. “Your late,” he said. She had known he would be there, she had known since she opened the letter on tuesday.
The climb is written as dread, but the last line says she expected him, which drains the suspense out of the scene after the fact. Decide what she knows. If she knows, make the climb about bracing for him. If she doesn't, cut the last line and let his first words land as a shock. Either way, the letter has to appear earlier, probably in chapter 2, or readers will feel cheated.
Marguerite had hated the lighthouse since she was a girl. She took the 114 steps slowly, her heart pounding. Tomas was waiting at the top. Eleven years. “You're late,” he said. She had known he would be there since Tuesday, when the letter came.
- “her heart was pounding” → “her heart pounding” (comma splice, fixed with the smallest change).
- “Your late” → “You're late”; “tuesday” → “Tuesday”.
- Second comma splice: “would be there, she had known” → “would be there. She had known”.
- Left “114 steps” in numerals (Chicago spells out zero through one hundred) and “who she hadn't seen” as it is: the narration is close to Marguerite, and “whom” would sound stiff. Both noted on the style sheet.
- Query: “AU: Tomas is ‘Tomás’ in chapter 3. Which spelling should I use throughout?”
A proofreader sees this paragraph only after typesetting and looks for what the layout broke: a word hyphenated badly at a line end, a missing closing quotation mark, a running head on the wrong page. If the developmental note was the part you most wanted to write, you are a structural editor in the making. If the comma splices bothered you before the plot did, start with copy editing.
Skills and tools you need
Editing is less about loving language than about being able to defend each change to the person who wrote the sentence.
- Grammar you can explain. Authors ask why. “It sounds wrong” does not survive a reply from someone who likes their sentence.
- The market's style manual. The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition, 2024) for most books, the AP Stylebook for news, PR and much marketing, APA or AMA for academic and medical work, plus the client's own style guide. You need to know where things are, not every rule by heart.
- Word's Track Changes and comments. Manuscripts travel as .docx files with tracked edits, so this is the working format whatever you think of it. Proofreaders also mark up PDFs and use the standard proofreading marks.
- A style sheet habit. A style sheet records every decision for one manuscript: spellings, hyphenation, number style, a character's eye color. It is how a 90,000-word book stays consistent, and the next editor in line relies on it.
- Restraint. Fix errors. Offer preferences as suggestions, labeled as such. The author's voice is not a mistake.
Queries deserve practice of their own. A good one says what you found and where, and offers a fix the author can accept in one word.
Queries that get answered
- AU: Tomas is ‘Tomás’ in chapter 3. Which spelling should I use throughout?
- AU: The letter arrives on Tuesday here but Wednesday in chapter 2. Change this to Wednesday?
- AU: Marguerite is 34 here and 36 in chapter 9, a month later. Which age is right?
Queries that annoy
- Wrong name?
- This doesn't make sense.
- A rewritten sentence in the comment, with no word on what was wrong with the original.
Training: degrees, certificates and courses
No license is needed to call yourself an editor. For salaried jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry requirement, usually in English, communications or journalism. Freelance clients rarely ask about degrees. They ask for a test or a sample. Training earns its keep by giving you marked-up feedback on your own edits, which a book cannot.
- University extension certificates. UC San Diego Extended Studies' copyediting certificate, for example, is four online courses taken one per quarter over about a year, taught to Chicago style, for roughly $3,000 at the time of writing.
- Poynter ACES Certificates in Editing. Online certificates from the Poynter Institute and ACES: The Society for Editing.
- Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) courses. Short webinars, four-to-six-week courses with instructor feedback, and self-paced courses on topics such as copyediting fiction.
- Outside the US. Editors Canada runs certification exams in proofreading, copy editing, stylistic editing and structural editing, and passing all four earns the Certified Professional Editor credential. In the UK, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) offers proofreading and copyediting courses.
Fees and formats change, so check each program's current page. A professional association is worth joining early whichever course you take: ACES and the EFA both run job listings and member directories, and the conversations there teach the business side no course covers.
What editors earn
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts the median pay for editors at $77,920 a year (May 2025). That figure covers every kind of editor, including senior and managing roles, so assistant jobs start lower. Of about 105,000 editors, roughly 9% are self-employed. The bureau projects a 1% decline in editor jobs from 2025 to 2035, with about 7,900 openings a year, mostly from people leaving the field.
Freelance rates are better documented than most. The Editorial Freelancers Association surveys its members and publishes median-based ranges. Its 2026 chart drew more than 1,100 responses on rates charged in 2025.
| Service | Fiction, per word | Nonfiction, per word | Per hour, fiction |
|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceDevelopmental editing | Fiction, per word3.0–3.5¢ | Nonfiction, per word4.0–5.0¢ | Per hour, fiction$52.50–70 |
| ServiceLine editing | Fiction, per word2.7–3.5¢ | Nonfiction, per word3.5–5.0¢ | Per hour, fiction$50–60 |
| ServiceCopy editing | Fiction, per word2.0–2.7¢ | Nonfiction, per word3.0–4.0¢ | Per hour, fiction$40–50 |
| ServiceProofreading | Fiction, per word1.2–2.0¢ | Nonfiction, per word2.0–3.0¢ | Per hour, fiction$35–45 |
Use the ranges to sanity-check a quote. Copy editing an 80,000-word novel at 2.0–2.7¢ a word comes to $1,600–2,160. The same chart's pace, 6–10 pages an hour at 250 words a page, puts the job at 32 to 53 hours. If you are slower than that while you learn, quote per word: the client pays a fair price and you are not billing them for your practice. Business and marketing copy editing, the content editor's territory, runs $50–60 an hour in the same chart.
How to become an editor, step by step
- Choose a level and a market
Write down one sentence: “I copyedit fiction for independent authors” or “I edit AP-style articles for B2B marketing teams.” It decides which manual you learn, where you look for work and what your samples should be.
- Learn the manual and Track Changes
Edit with the manual open and look up every change you are not sure of. Speed comes from knowing where the answer lives. Learn Word's Track Changes, comments and find-and-replace until they take no thought.
- Build samples you can show
Edit for people who need it and will let you show the result: a student journal, a nonprofit newsletter, a writing group's anthology, a colleague's reports. Keep each before and after, and ask permission before you use any of it. A short set of strong pages beats a long list, and the portfolio examples show how others present theirs.
- Get feedback on your edits
Take a course, swap edits with another trainee, or pay an experienced editor to review a sample edit. Notes on your own changes teach you faster than any rulebook which ones you can defend.
- Apply for jobs or pitch for work
For a staff job, apply for editorial assistant roles at publishers, magazines and newsrooms, and expect an editing test. For freelance work, write a short letter to managing or production editors asking to take their freelance test, list yourself in association directories, and tell every writer you know what you now do.
- Set terms in writing
Before you start, agree on the level of edit, the number of passes, the deadline, the fee and what you will deliver. A short paid or free sample edit lets the client see your work and lets you see the manuscript before you quote. A freelance contract template gives you the clauses to adapt.
- Track your pace and raise your level
Log hours per job so your next quote rests on your own numbers. Ask happy clients for a line you can quote. Move up to line or developmental work once you have a body of copy edits behind you.
Mistakes that cost new editors work
- Rewriting in your own voice. The line edit above keeps Marguerite's story and the author's plain style. An editor who turns every page into their own prose does not get the second book.
- Skipping the style sheet. Without it, chapter 20 contradicts chapter 2 and the proofreader inherits the mess.
- Quoting before you see the manuscript. Two books of the same length can take very different amounts of time, depending on how clean the draft is.
- Selling every level at once. “Developmental, line, copy and proofreading” on day one reads as none of them.
- Feeding a client's book to an AI tool without asking. It is their unpublished work, and the contract may say where it can go. Ask first.
Where Strokes fits
Client manuscripts mostly travel as Word files with tracked changes, and that is how you should deliver them. Strokes is useful for the work around the edit. Keep a project per client with the style sheet, the query list and the edit letter as documents in one folder. Version history saves as you go and shows any earlier version with the changes marked, which turns your own practice edits into before-and-after samples. Export the edit letter to Word or PDF when it goes out. While you study, ask the AI Assistant why a sentence breaks a rule, then check its answer against the manual: a model can be confidently wrong about house style.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need a degree to become an editor?
Not for freelance work: clients judge an editing test and samples. For salaried jobs, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics lists a bachelor's degree as typical, usually in English, communications or journalism. Subject knowledge counts too: a nurse who learns AMA style has an edge in medical editing.
How long does it take to become an editor?
There is no fixed timeline. A structured certificate such as UC San Diego's copyediting program takes about a year part-time, and you can take small paid jobs while you study. Staff editors often start as editorial assistants and are promoted from there.
How much do freelance editors charge?
In the Editorial Freelancers Association's 2026 rate chart, fiction copy editing runs about 2.0 to 2.7 cents a word ($40 to $50 an hour) and fiction developmental editing 3.0 to 3.5 cents. Nonfiction, academic and medical work pay more. Rates vary with experience, deadline and subject.
What is the difference between an editor and a proofreader?
An editor changes the text: its structure, its sentences or its correctness and consistency. A proofreader checks the final typeset version for errors that slipped through or that the layout introduced, and changes as little as possible.
How do I get editing experience with no experience?
Volunteer edits for a student journal, a nonprofit newsletter or a writing group's anthology, with permission to show the before and after. Then take publishers' freelance tests, which judge your edits rather than your résumé.
