What an editor asks before quoting
A quote for editing is an estimate of how long a manuscript will take to read carefully and repair, and almost every question an editor asks beforehand exists to sharpen that estimate. Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards put the reason plainly, requiring an editor to understand how the scope of a project, including its audience, medium, and purpose, affects the editing.1 An author who knows why each question is asked can answer it usefully rather than briefly.
What is the book about, in one or two sentences?
The length of the request is the point. A book an author can describe in two sentences usually has a settled argument or a settled story. One that takes a page to describe often has two books inside it, or an argument still forming.
The answer also tells an editor what to protect. A summary that emphasizes voice signals a different pass from one that emphasizes a sequence of events, and the standards require changes to be made without altering intended meaning.1
Nothing here is a test. An author who cannot yet compress the book is telling the editor something real about which level of editing would help, and that is more useful than a polished sentence that hides it.
Is it fiction or nonfiction, and what genre or category?
Category determines what an editor has to check as well as how fast the reading goes. Nonfiction brings notes, sources, permissions, and factual consistency into scope. Fiction brings continuity of character, chronology, and point of view instead.
It also determines price in the published data. The EFA's 2026 rate chart reports separate figures by subject and genre rather than one rate for editing, so the category is an input to the number rather than background information.2
Where a book sits between categories, saying so early is better than choosing a label to be helpful. Narrative nonfiction, autofiction, and memoir containing invented scenes each carry a mix of the two sets of checks, and the mix is what the editor needs to know about.
What is the current word count, and is the manuscript complete?
Two questions are being asked because they fail in different ways. A count that turns out to be wrong moves the price. A manuscript that turns out to be incomplete moves the schedule, and sometimes moves the level of editing as well.
The count an editor needs includes notes, captions, appendixes, and anything else that will be read. Complete means something narrower than finished: a reader could start at the first page and reach the last without being told what is missing.
Where a book is genuinely still being written, saying so costs nothing. It usually points toward a different arrangement, such as a structural read now and a copyedit later. It also avoids paying to copyedit chapters that will not survive the next revision.
Which draft is this?
The number matters less than what changed between the drafts. An author who has revised four times for structure has a different manuscript from one who has revised four times for sentences, even at the same draft count.
The standards ask an editor to consider the implications of time, cost, production processes, and the intended audience when suggesting changes, and the draft history is part of that.1 Suggesting a structural rebuild to an author who has already tried two is unhelpful in a specific and avoidable way.
The most useful version of this answer names the last substantial change. A book reorganized two drafts ago is at a different stage from one reorganized last week, and the second is more likely to have loose ends the author has not found yet.
What are the closest published comparisons?
Comparisons tell an editor which conventions the book is working inside. A thriller, a literary novel, and a young adult novel handle chapter length, point of view, and exposition differently, and an editor reading against the wrong set of expectations gives the wrong advice.
Publishers ask the same question for their own reasons, and their versions are more demanding. Princeton University Press asks for title, author, publisher, and year, with a statement of how the book differs.3
For an editing quote the requirement is looser than a publisher's. Two or three real books, named, are enough to establish the conventions in play. An author who names none is asking the editor to guess, and the guess will sometimes be wrong.
Who is the intended reader, and is the book for adults, young adults, or children?
The intended reader sets the standard against which every sentence is judged. A passage that assumes prior knowledge is a problem for a general reader and correct for a specialist, and an editor cannot tell which without being told.
Age category is a separate question with production consequences. Books for younger readers carry conventions about vocabulary, sentence length, and content that an editor has to apply consistently, and the EFA's rate data now reports separately on work for those audiences.2
The standards frame this as scope rather than taste, requiring an editor to grasp how audience, medium, and purpose affect the work.1 An answer of general readers is acceptable when it is true and unhelpful when it is a way of avoiding the question.
Who has read it so far?
This tells an editor what has already been found. A manuscript read by a writing group, three friends, and a beta reader has usually had its obvious faults removed, and the remaining problems are the ones ordinary readers do not articulate.
A manuscript nobody has read is a different job. The first outside reading finds a great deal at once, and an editor may recommend a cheaper assessment before a full pass rather than charging for a copyedit that will be overtaken by revision.
The EFA's guide for new authors suggests a writers' group for feedback before hiring professionally, which is the same point made from the author's side.4 Readers who are not editors find real problems, and they find them for nothing.
Has it been edited before, and at what level?
Previous editing changes what is left to do and it changes what should not be undone. Decisions made deliberately in an earlier pass look like inconsistencies to a new editor who has not been told about them.
The practical request is the previous style sheet. Where one exists, it saves the second editor from rediscovering every decision by inspection. Where none exists, the second editor will build one, and some of the first editor's choices will not survive the rebuilding.
Where an author was unhappy with the earlier edit, describing what went wrong is more useful than describing it as bad. A pass that intervened too heavily and a pass that missed errors call for different work next time, and only the author knows which happened.
Has it been submitted anywhere, and what came back?
Rejection letters are evidence whenever they say anything specific. Three agents independently mentioning pace, or two editors mentioning the opening, amounts to a finding that would otherwise cost a structural read to reach. Those letters are worth keeping and worth showing.
Form rejections carry no information and should not be read as though they did. An author with forty form responses knows only that forty people declined, which is compatible with almost any explanation of why.
This is also where an editor learns what the author is hoping to buy. Writer Beware is explicit that no reputable editor will promise commercial success or claim a book has huge commercial potential.5 An editor who knows the submission history can say so at the start rather than after the invoice.
Was any of it published previously in another form?
Previously published material brings rights and consistency questions with it. An essay adapted into a chapter may still be under contract elsewhere, which is a permissions problem rather than an editorial one. A blog series turned into a book carries a different register from anything written for the book.
The consistency problem is the one authors underestimate. Material written across several years for different audiences arrives with different assumptions about what the reader already knows. Reconciling those assumptions is structural work rather than copyediting, and it is priced accordingly.
Saying which parts were published where lets an editor plan the pass around it. Discovering it in chapter nine, from a change in voice, costs a conversation and sometimes a revised quote.
Was it written in English, or translated?
A translated text needs a different kind of attention, and the editor should know before quoting rather than after starting. Constructions that are grammatical but not idiomatic appear throughout rather than in patches, and addressing them is closer to stylistic editing than to copyediting.
Where the author wrote in English as an additional language, the same applies with a further consideration. Some of what looks like error is voice, and an editor who flattens all of it has removed something the book may want.
The standards require an editor to confirm before starting that they have the skills, training, and experience the work needs.1 Editing translated prose is one of the places where that requirement has real force, and an editor who has never done it should say so.
How am I planning to publish it, and is there a deadline?
The publishing route decides what the edit has to produce. A manuscript going to agents needs to be readable and correct. A manuscript going to a publisher will meet that publisher's house style anyway. A self-published book needs a style sheet, a proofread after typesetting, and decisions nobody upstream will make.
The deadline decides the schedule and sometimes the price, since rush work commands higher rates.4 The useful answer names what is driving the date rather than the date alone, because a deadline set by a contract behaves differently from one an author set for themselves.
Answers to these questions are worth writing down once and reusing, because the same list comes up with every editor an author approaches. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, and so is everything an author tells us in answering them.
References
- Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024: A. The Fundamentals of Editing. https://editors.ca/publications/professional-editorial-standards/fundamentals-editing/ ↩
- Editorial Freelancers Association, 2026 Editorial Rate Chart. https://www.the-efa.org/rates/ ↩
- Princeton University Press, Proposal Guidelines. https://press.princeton.edu/node/593 ↩
- Editorial Freelancers Association, Hiring an Editor: A Guide for New Authors, revised July 2022. https://www.the-efa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/EFA-Hiring-an-Editor-A-Guide-for-New-Authors_REV-7-2022.pdf ↩
- SFWA, Writer Beware: Editors and Editing, updated December 14, 2025. https://sfwa.org/other-resources/writer-beware/editors/ ↩