Our founding partner, Richard Shrout mentioned the other day that we are still unique in our business model, which has endured since 2006. Our collegial partnership of book indexers, taxonomists, and editors has served us very well over the years. This is a good time to go over the workings of this little group of […]
PI Day 2024: The Beauty of the Irrational
Since we are PI (Potomac Indexing), we’ve always held the mathematical constant, π, close to our hearts and use it in our logo. So, today being π day, we are duly celebrating the usefulness of this great and ultimately impossible-to-pin-down number (more on π’s wonderfully irrational and transcendental qualities at Wikipedia, here). As indexers and taxonomists, we work with […]
Tightening Up Biography Indexes
Tradition in indexes of biographical subjects has always been a bit counter-intuitive to us indexers. With other subjects, best practices call upon us to avoid long lists of subheadings under what we term “metatopics” (topics that cover the whole book or very large portions of it), and to make main headings out of most of […]
Publishing Client Schedule Uncertainties
In the almost-thirty years I’ve been indexing and editing, many changes have occurred in the publishing industry, but the one that affects me the most on a weekly basis is the floating calendar. In spite of (or perhaps because of) fancy book design software and instant emailing of manuscript copy, the timeline for publishing books […]
Indexing Time: The Mental Challenge
I’ve noticed that book indexing can be a challenging mental task, and it’s easy to underestimate how much productive time one can spend on it. We usually schedule a couple of weeks to get an indexing project done, but a lot of that is just juggling multiple deadlines. So, how long does it really take […]
Book Indexing for Authors: Part 4
Double-posting vs. Cross-references This last section should round out our four-part look at getting a quality index done for your book (see below for a link to the whole series). Posting different versions of your indexable term or using cross-references to other related terms is very much like the hyperlinking function used to link topics […]
