I find that an index evaluation exercise is a great way to remind myself and any new indexers I’m mentoring about how important our indexing principles and best practices are to the reader or browser’s experience of a book or other document. It’s actually quite easy to identify some of the worst offenders in index construction. […]
Term Selection for Indexes: Mechanics vs. Semantics
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 […]
