Anyone who self publishes knows that hiring an editor can be costly.  I’ve seen people offering editing services for as low as $.02 per word or $1000 for a 300 page novel. Some charge per hour and they change $20 an hour and do an average of about 10 pages an hour. Some editors charge per page and I’ve seen those range in cost from $2 to $5 per page. Then there are the freelancer options where you can go on a site like FreeLancer (or a similar site) and hire someone from another country and get a 300 page novel done for around $150 or go the Fiverr route and with them a good editor will cost you about $5 per chapter.

I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that hiring an editor can be expensive. But as everyone will tell you, it doesn’t matter what it costs, in the end if you want to publish your book it’s something you have to do. Everybody needs an editor for their book, period.

So what can you do to get your book edited for free? Back in the day people used to barter. You do for me, I’ll do for you.  With a site like Fiverr you can pretty much do just that.  Let me explain how it works.

When you do a job for someone at Fiverr they pay $5 for it. You get paid $4 of that $5.

So what I did was offer my services as a beta reader. I would read up to 10,000 words of a person’s book and tell them my thoughts. I charge $5 for said services. I ended up doing about 20 of these jobs and had $100 credit in my Fiverr account.

A good editor at Fiverr cost you about $5 per chapter. My book had 15 chapters. If I was to buy the services it would cost me $75. But since I already had the $100 credit in my account, I got my editing services for free.

So basically again how this works is, you offer your services (of any kind) on Fiverr and then use the money you earn to get your book edited for free. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

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