Dumb Question - What's An Index?

Finally an answer I know. The index is that part at the back which cross references the information in the text. Example: I'm looking at a book about south Texas in the 1870s, and I want to know if it mentions my GGG grandfather. I look in the index for his name. If his name is there, it tells me which pages he is mentioned on. I imagine it would cost money because it would take a lot of time, first to list all the names of people and places and events, and secondly to make sure you had the right page numbers attached to them.

MM

Ummm ... modern software generates indexes automatically.

Even in the good ol' days we used to simply a script over the text and it would generate a massive index automagically. When I did it last (for a thesis over a decade ago) we used to just let it generate an index entry for every non-trivial word and then just manually delete the ones we didn't want. You'd end up deleting thousands and thousands of entries, but it was easier to delete entries than create them!

I'm sure that modern publishing has much nicer tools ... you could probably do it with a Word Macro pretty easily. (You'd want to allow the user to add a word list for combined words with spaces ... so 'General Phillips' would be a single entry, rather than 'General' & 'Phillips')

It would be a fairly straight forward macro, though.

Mac

I would talk with your publisher about ditching that part of the agreement. Creating an index these days is really not that big a deal. Definitely should be negotiating on that--it just sounds dumb.

Indexing is a bit of skill, even with the software and other programs that do a lot of the work for you. It's also a standard part of almost any non-fiction contract, and I found it worth the cost -- because even with the software that can sort and organize, it's still an enormous headache, and a responsibility that I wasn't comfortable taking on myself.

But on the other hand, if you know how to do it, negotiate away. In my case, it wasn't anything I insisted on pulling out. (My head was already spinning after doing all the endnotes -- I couldn't imagine indexing after that!)

Any good indexer won't rely solely on software to get the job done. They will go through it with a fine-toothed comb, cross-check, confirm alpha order, etc. It can be very time-consuming, especially if the index being created is deeper than a topical table of contents, which only skims the surface of the content in a book. Talk with your agent/publisher about the average cost an index for a book your size. It might not be that much.

Yeah, I was going to say, when I worked for an academic publisher (MS editorial), it was rare that we got an index done by the author of the book, and we dreaded it when we did. Most were pretty clueless.

And while there are excellent, efficient indexers all over the world, sometimes, the proofreaders deserve great thanks. Because those indexes are sometimes such a wretched mess. And your fingers begin to ache from the constant turning of pages in the Chicago MoS.

Sunnyside said:

Indexing is a bit of skill, even with the software and other programs that do a lot of the work for you....(My head was already spinning after doing all the endnotes -- I couldn't imagine indexing after that!)

Click to expand...

I was elated when I got a professional, formatted index with minimal errors. And oh my Shiva, Sunny, the endnotes are such a project! They definitely spin heads!

As an author I prefer to do my own index. I can understand why a publusher would charge back the cost if they had to contract it out to someone. It might also delay publcation.

Keep in mind the obvious: the index needs to be on the final edited copy with the correct paging.

Nevertheless, it shouldn't be more than a few hundred bucks with the new software, etc.

I dislike books that contain no index.