Book Indexing, An Art

I’ve been doing a lot of book indexing recently, which is something I fell into unintentionally and have enjoyed immensely. I love developmental and copy editing with my whole heart, and have to also admit that indexing has become a favorite of mine as well.

Who knew? Life twists and turns in weird ways, and then you’re 38 with a PhD in German Studies and have your own business where you work with authors at (now literally) every stage of manuscript development.

Indexing is not just about ctrl + F-ing for certain words and writing down the page numbers where these words appear, though I certainly have experienced indices that have been constructed in this manner. It’s super annoying because you want information related to that word, that concept, that person, that event, and what you get is, in most cases, a passing mention with no context or elaboration. It wastes your time.

A good index is one that directs the reader to the main ideas of the book in various ways: use of synonyms, field-specific terms and concepts, cross-references, and the inclusion of references to further information related peripherally to the topic are used to make sure that every entry is a helpful and useful one.

It takes A LOT of time to create a good index. A recent academic book manuscript I worked on took me upwards of 30 hours to construct, refine, and perfect. You must read the text in its entirety and take scrupulous and detailed notes before you even begin. Then, you must go back through each and every paragraph to determine what useful information is there, and how it relates to the various main ideas of the text. You have to discern who and what is important enough to index, and what and who is not. You have to put yourself in many readers‘ shoes and consider how they might use the index, what words they will search for. It’s an exercise in considering many perspectives, in determining the relationship between all sorts of information, and in weighing comprehensibility with utility and thoroughness.

It’s a marathon of a project and takes a great amount of patience, and I really wasn’t sure I’d like it, to be honest.

But I really really do. It’s an intellectual endeavor unlike any other, and learning how to do it has been a great challenge for me. Turns out, maybe I’m an indexer as well as an editor. We certainly do contain multitudes, I suppose.

So, if you need someone to index your next book, you know who to reach out to now :)