The printed book seems to be alive and thriving, and you will likely find that non-fiction publishing requirements in your organization include indexes. Even if you are self-publishing, you may need an index to enhance the sales value of a longer non-fiction book or make your book a better reference companion for your courses or workshops.
Index as Map
Indexing is an information access tool that’s about taking a linear text and making a “map” of it based on all the most important topics and names (“most important” is what makes an index more useful than search engine results, because a human understands semantic contextual importance better than artificial intelligence learning systems—at least so far). We can create for you a whole new way to see your book, as if from a mountaintop perspective, looking out across the vista to pick out the valleys, forested areas, deserts, and rivers across the text’s landscape.
When to Index
To make sure that indexing is the service you really need, keep in mind that most of the time, books of more than 100 pages or websites with lots of subject terms over many pages or posts that need to be gathered together are the best candidates. With how-to or technical books or manuals, you may want to drop that ready-for-indexing printed page count to 50. If you need help deciding on indexing, just contact us.
Our Talent Scope
With our partnership-and-associates business model, we have a broad and deep pool of talented indexers to call upon for indexing projects of varied type and scope. Particularly if you need ongoing indexing services for book series, we can call on teams of indexers from our pool of over thirty experienced professionals and coordinate their efforts for seamless, on-time, intelligent indexing solutions.
Name and Scripture Indexes
Because of our ability to bring together expertise from a wide variety of subject areas, PI is your go-to resource for name and scripture indexes.
These indexes often require background knowledge in names from other countries. In the case of scripture indexes, indexers will need to have a knowledge of standard arrangements of books and naming conventions. Potomac Indexing can quickly pull together indexers with the knowledge base to expertly handle these specialized indexing tasks.
Individual Authors
What if you’re a self-publishing or academic author looking for an index for that one book? We can cover your special topic with subject expertise and a partner’s personal attention for the life of your project. We can also adjust with ease to your publication pace.
Indexing is an art, and each index reflects the style of its creator. Creating professional-quality information access of any kind is a detail-oriented, custom job. Our partner-and-specialized associates model allows us to respect the style and integrity of your work by matching the best indexer to your project.
Copy Editing and Proofreading, Too!
In addition, some of our partners and associates are also copy editors and proofreaders, which allows you to get three services for your manuscript in one place. We can save you money by helping you produce a clean copy with copy editing prior to the indexing process, and then consolidate indexing with proofreading. For more details on these services, check out our Editing and Proofreading page.
Embedded Indexing
Not all indexes for printed books are single projects with one product. Books that are revised frequently (think manuals or how-to books) often benefit from an embedded index, which will allow the index entries to change page numbers automatically when revisions are made to new editions. For more on embedded indexing, and how it’s used for ebooks and other digital publishing, see our Indexes for Digital Resources services.
