I’ve had some interesting additions to indexes during author reviews, mostly about adding in additional mentions of names. One point of occasional tension between book indexers and authors will be how to handle names in the index. Authors have a tendency to lean in the direction of every-mention-of-every-name, or at least “every-mention-of-names-that-are-important-to-me.” 🙂 Meanwhile, the […]
It’s the Experience, Really!
Steve Jobs was right. Give the customer an experience, not just a product. And that applies just as well to those of us providing freelance services in the publishing industry. I see the customer experience as being 50% product quality, 50% customer service. In the end, my job is to service the customer experience. Product […]
Building an Online Library
Here at PI, we are finding more small-scale consulting and special interest businesses looking to build virtual libraries of information for their users. And they are often coming from a place where they don’t quite know what “pieces” they need to get this done in a way that’s useful. Their project is too big for […]
Finding Your Client Match
I’ve had a couple of jobs recently where I totally miscalculated my suitability to the client’s needs. I lost money because of it, quite a bit for me, because I had to spend way too much time dealing with the client mismatch. There’s scope creep for the job itself (book turns out to be more […]
Preventing and Handling Scope Creep
One of the biggest challenges in indexing services (and editing and proofreading as well, but I’ll focus on indexing for this post) is to accurately estimate the scope of a project in order to provide a flat fee or per-page fee that then translates into a reasonable hourly rate for the indexer. I’ll cover two […]
Proofreading: More than Just Spelling
We recently finished a big handbook proofreading project, and it’s pointing up that the scope of proofreading goes way beyond simple grammar and spelling errors. We also check for consistency on a lot of other things besides these two. In this project, with almost two dozen chapters written by different authors, the issue of keeping […]
