I'm 23 and in two years I will have a bachelors in English. I want to go into (book) editing. My question is, what is the life like of a book editor? Do you join a company and then authors go to you to edit their books? How much do you get paid? What are the hours like and all that? I mainly wanna know what the actual responsibilities of a book editor is. And is it something people make a living off of (with a bachelors)? Thanks for any info!

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Oh dear, there are so many books waiting to be published, do they all need an 'editor'? I have read many books written by folk that could hardly string a sentence together. Mainly autobiographies, if these had been 'edited' they would loose must of their substance , I dont examine anything to see if it is out of context or a punctuation is in the wrong spot. OK thats my waffle bit over. Back to your original question, and this is why I started off by saying "Oh dear"! I have known just three editors , all to do with technical publications, I have worked on technical publications for Japanese, Arab, all sorts of folk, these books are in the form of training manuals for the benifit of their trainees, as I was knocking out these things I discussed details with the Engineers present, all agreed, so then it was required that all this went to an editor, weeks it took, came back with red lines all over the place, I did my nut, here were guys telling me what my trade was all about, they had never been out of an office! I rewrote just one manual gave it to my client to check out (a Japanese engineer) he looked at me in amazement! "What this is"?? He asked I explained , he then did his nut! Everything went back to the original. How much do you get paid?? If you can find a job you get paid very little by working for a company, your best bet would be to go for contract jobs. But you need some sort of previous experience before you could land a contract job, the if you do get one you are likely to come across a few folk like me, Oh dear!!!! Sorry if this has burst your bubble.