The short answer: professional proofreading typically runs $0.004–$0.02 per word — roughly $300–$1,500 for an 80,000-word romance novel. It's the cheapest professional edit you'll ever buy, and the one you should buy last. Here's what the money covers, what moves the price, and how to make sure you only pay for it once.
Proofreading is the final check of the finished book: typos, missing words, doubled words, stray punctuation, formatting slips. It is not a copyedit — that fixes grammar and consistency across the manuscript — and it's nowhere near a line edit, which reshapes how your prose reads. If you're not sure which edit you actually need, start with the guide to what order edits go in.
Because the job is narrower, the rate is lower — but the stakes are still real. Reviews that say "needed an editor" are usually complaining about exactly the errors a proofread exists to catch.
| Option | Typical cost (80k-word novel) | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Freelance proofreader | $300 – $1,500 (about $0.004–$0.02/word) | 1–3 weeks |
| Editorial agency | $1,000 – $2,500 | 2–4 weeks |
| Copyedit + proofread combined | $1,200 – $3,500 | 3–6 weeks |
| Starport Proofreading (human, with a Reader's Note) | See the Proofreading page | About a week |
Starport's own Proofreading is the one human service on the station: a real proofreader — who is also a genuine romance reader — reads your finished book cover to cover, returns your manuscript with tracked changes in place, and adds a candid Reader's Note on how the book actually read.
Proofreading comes dead last. After the developmental work, after the line edit, after the copyedit, after your final read-through — after everything. Every change you make after the proofread can introduce brand-new errors into pages that were certified clean.
The classic way authors pay twice: proofread the manuscript, then "just quickly" revise a chapter, tweak the opening, or re-format for print. Now the changed pages are unproofed, and the choice is a second pass or shipping errors. Lock the book first. Proofread once.
The Manuscript Scorecard grades your full manuscript on nine craft metrics, benchmarks it against professionally-edited books, and tells you exactly what to fix first. Free, in minutes.
Get your free Manuscript Scorecard →You can get close, but after enough passes you read what you meant to type, not what's on the page. Changing font, device or format helps you catch more — a fresh pair of human eyes is still the reliable fix for the last errors.
A copyedit fixes grammar, punctuation and consistency across the manuscript while it's still being worked on. A proofread is the final quality check of the finished file, after every other change has been made.
Software catches a lot, so run it first — but it misses wrong-word typos, homophone slips, continuity of hyphenation and formatting errors. Let the human pass spend its time on what the software can't see.
Last. After all edits, revisions and formatting are final. Any change made after the proofread can introduce new errors into pages that were already checked.