I'm not going to be as nice as this lady. If you don't have an editor, please don't publish. I don't care if you're paying that editor or not, but they need to be someone who *can* edit professionally. Technically, yes, you have a choice of whether or not to get outside help with your book, but I have yet to find the unicorn miracle that is good without any outside professional help. Opting to "not" is a great way to produce trash. However, a good edit is going to run $3-5k. The £880 quoted as an average here for an 80k manuscript is only around 13 hours of work at $60/hr (which is a good editor's rate). That's not really realistic. I expect the quoted average, then, is not really a dev or line editor's average, but is a blend including copy, which is a lot cheaper. I recommend, if you can't afford this, to work on your own editing skills (check out our videos--we discuss a lot of developmental editing topics in the context of actual books) and then *swap* work with other people. Basically, use your time as currency instead to get others to help you edit. But do not publish without outside editing advice.