When I’m teaching or mentoring prospective indexers, I focus primarily on term selection. Term selection involves the uniquely important indexing task of making decisions about what actually goes in the index. Unlike a search engine, we indexers don’t just put every mention of every term in the index. Being able to discern what is important, […]
Generating Page Numbers for an Index
While I was working on a guest post over at Julie Karen’s book design site recently (she’s awesome, BTW), she asked me the following question: Once you have compiled your list of search terms manually, do you have a software that at least generates the page numbers for you automatically using your list? I think […]
Marketing Your Indexing Services
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 […]
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 […]
Embedded Indexing: Client Perspective
We at PI are seeing more publishers wanting embedded indexing for ebooks and/or just to get the indexing done earlier in the production cycle (before final page proof). Traditional Embedded Indexing: The Issues Embedded indexing directly in either InDesign or Microsoft Word has some built-in problems that make the task tedious and quite a bit […]
PI Associate Interview: Elise Hess
We’re running a series of interviews to introduce you all to our wonderfully talented group of independent indexers and taxonomists who enable us to say “yes” to the variety of project types and turnaround times our clients are looking for. Today, we’d like you to get to know one of our newer indexers, Elise Hess. Your […]
