Hiring a Pre-submission Editor

This month I’m researching editors to do a close read of a manuscript. These folks seem to really range in price. Some charge $10,000 per novel! One lady who’s a romance writer wants $1500 for a full book. And then there’s a $450 quote from a young adult author I think quite well of. Why the range? I can’t get a real bead on what qualifies as “expert” among these freelancers. Nor can I tell for sure what success they have with their clients — if the resulting prose makes it to a contract for the author who paid them. These results don’t seem to appear on the editor’s websites. Strange. It would seem they’d want to celebrate their success.

So, are they legit? One can’t know, really, without a client list, I would think.

Writers — if your MS’s aren’t making it as well as you’d like with the agents, have YOU ever used or considered using a professional editor to help retool some pages? I’d be glad of the reply, and, even better, advice on how to evaluate the “experts.”