Information about Indexing

It's the last thing you have to do and the last thing you want to do, but the index is often the first thing people will look at when they pick your book up.


Does it really matter whether my book has a good index?
Certainly. An index determines your book's usability and hence its usefulness.

Acquisitions librarians have a sharp sense of what a good index is and will often make decisions based on how useful they think your book will be to readers.

Reviewers often make heavy use of a book's index to get a handle on its content. A thin or poorly structured index may cause a reviewer to assume your book doesn't cover a topic when in fact it does. Also, indexes are rarely mentioned in reviews, but when they are it is often because the reviewer has found them exasperatingly bad. That's not good.

Potential readers want to get an idea of what a book covers and what it does not. Indexes are consulted for this purpose more frequently than tables of contents, because indexes are alphabetized and detailed. They are also, by and large, presented in language that is informative and unmannered.

A good index can have a very direct effect on the size of your readership and the quality of notice attracted.

Can I index my own book?
Many authors do index their own books. If that is what you have decided to do, you will find Chapter 18 of the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) indispensable. Nancy Mulvany's Indexing Books (2nd edition) is an excellent practical guide.

And if you would rather not use a shoebox and a pile o' index cards, there is a simple DOS program called wINDEX which is apparently quite user-friendly and capable of generating simple indexes. You can read about it here. It is relatively cheap at US $129 (professional indexing programs such as SKY and Cindex cost between US $400 and $600).

What are the advantages of hiring a professional indexer?
Indexing isn't rocket science. But it is fiddly, time-consuming work. If you are learning to prepare an index from scratch, the usual three-week window for proofreading and indexing that publishers allow may be too short a period in which to do both tasks well, in addition to whatever it is you do in regular life.

It took me two months of training to become a professional indexer. My first job was 329 pages long and it took me 14 consecutive nine-hour days to finish it. I'm not an especially slow learner, and I have got a lot faster since, but the experience certainly taught me respect for my new profession.

Some things become second nature to indexers that may take other people some time to figure out. What is the difference between letter-by-letter and word-by-word alphabetization? How should one index a numeral (say, the book entitled 1421)? What is the correct way to index an aristocratic title (say, Lord Beaverbrook, whose name was really Max Aitken)? While you're looking these things up in Chicago or Mulvany, a professional might spend the time indexing the next several pages.

There is also this advice (from Chicago, 18.2) to consider:

     Although authors know better than anyone else their
     subject matter and the audience to whom the work
     is addressed, not all can look at their work through the
     eyes of a potential reader.

As a professional indexer, my job is to anticipate the needs of the reader, and his or her most likely entry points when searching for a particular topic.

Won't indexes become obsolete now that there are search engines?
This is something professional indexers worry about. Not that search engines will render indexes obsolete—because no search engine can replace an index constructed by a thoughtful, well-read human being—but that people will be blind to the difference.

An index is not a concordance. It does not list every single instance of a name or a concept, just those instances that readers might find of real interest. In a recent book I indexed, the search function in my PDF reader allowed me to see that the phrase manufacturing sector appeared over a hundred times throughout the book. But in the majority of those instances, there was no salient information about the manufacturing sector that appeared with the phrase. In the end, I selected only 22 instances to list under the heading and divided those up into subheadings. I've no doubt that the entry I created will save many readers much time, and that both readers and the book are better served in this way than by a search engine.

Indexing sounds like a pretty subjective exercise when described this way.
Yes and no. There are many items that are indexed the same way no matter who does the index. But for more abstract concepts, creating an index becomes an act of interpretation. Indexers are interpreters of discourse.

That's why the best indexers are good readers and good writers, often with an academic or professional background related to the subject area of the books they index.

How do I find a good indexer?
Both the American Society for Indexing (ASI) and the Indexing Society of Canada (ISC) have searchable databases on their websites. If you're looking for an editor and an indexer, the Editors' Association of Canada (EAC) is a good place to look. All these databases are searchable by subject area.

For the ASI database of indexers, click here.
For the ISC database of indexers, click here.
For the EAC database of editors and indexers, click here.

Or you can send me an email at info@scholars-cap.com.