I often have new indexers ask me about marketing their services as they start out. The market has changed considerably since the 1990s when I was a newbie indexer. An entire publishing revolution has been happening since then. Crazy stuff with traditional publishers consolidating and outsourcing various production services to places like India, more packagers […]
Dead Indexes
I’ll never give up real, paper books (hardcopy) but I love ebooks, too, although I have a serious pet peeve about ebooks: indexes that are “dead.” A book without any index is sad, but a book with an unusable index is no only frustrating but not just plain painful. A lot of time and thought […]
How Do You Read for Indexing?
As indexers, we spend a lot of time reading. Good reading skills are essential. As I indexed more books, I found that my reading strategy changed. I remember plowing into that first book without any thought about how I could read it most efficiently to write the index. I just went right for the nitty-gritty […]
Shall I Index This Book?
Freelancing can be a tough gig. We are almost constantly concerned about getting and keeping clients and work. Even if we are up to our eyebrows in work, we hesitate to turn away work. Sometimes we submit a bid or accept anything that’s offered. No matter how desperate we are for work, acceptance should […]
PDF to Word Conversion
I’m a skeptic, and possibly addicted to hard data, i.e. to numbers, when it comes to evaluating advertising claims, etc. I’ve heard that Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is accurate in preserving pagination and format when converting to .docx, but I am instinctively skeptical. Because I want to be able to get PDFs into Index Manager […]
Using Adobe Search
No matter how much we enjoy our work, writing an index can at times be tedious, and even frustrating. We all know the disadvantages of full-text search; however, there are some things that can be made much easier with computer assistance. Search capabilities can be useful even though they can’t produce a quality index by […]
