While we’re definitely advocates for indexes in nearly all nonfiction books, there’s one genre in which an index is indispensable: cookbooks. Culinary pioneer (and indexer!) Julia Child wrote in The Way to Cook, “A reference or teaching book is only as good as its index.” Imagine trying to find a recipe without even a rudimentary list of titles? As in other subject areas, […]
Help! My Index Doesn’t Fit! Shortening an Index Without Sacrifice
So there you are, sighing in relief and stretching your shoulders, because you care about ergonomics. You’ve just typed in the last entry from the last page, and you’ve done all your basic editing tasks (spelling, deleting unnecessary subheadings, checking acronyms, you know the drill). It’s time to check the length against your client’s specs. You’re […]
Abstracting vs. Indexing
I have often been reminded by authors, novice indexers, and publishers that there can be some confusion over what an index is actually supposed to do. They want so much detail in the index that it becomes a cumbersome abstract of the document. In other words, they make it so that you don’t really have to leave the […]
The Gift of Quality to Effective Indexing
I’ve tried searching for something on the Web using keywords or phrases and been given a list, which although it’s filtered through a “relevance” algorithm, still gives me mostly irrelevant content. Some folks say it’s just me being lazy with my search terms and that I should go to the advanced search options to narrow […]
Mirror, Mirror: Matching the Index to the Text
There are various metaphors for an index: a roadmap, web, a library catalog, a hallway full of doors. I even sometimes graph out an index, putting what I think of as “vertical topics” (chapters and main sections) on the y-axis and “horizontal topics” (the small incidental themes that pop up over and over throughout the book) […]
Setting Boundaries with Clients
After an interesting conversation with a PI partner on Skype, I looked back and saw a blog post on setting boundaries that needed expression. I remember from when I started my freelance book indexing business the feeling of not wanting to turn down any jobs, because, who knows if another one would show up to […]
