Ever Index a Book?

I've never done it, but I think with today's word processing tools it would make the job somewhat easier than it would have been years ago. It would sort of depend too on how thorough an index you're planning on having; I've seen indexes that just listed the main references, and others that were 40 or more pages long.

I would think someone could do a good index in two or three days for most books, but I could be wrong.

I left the indexing up to someone who actually knew what they were doing. It cost me about the same amount against royalties that your publisher is charging you, but it was worth it to avoid the headaches.

Why not find out if someone here does this professionally and keep the money in the family?

I have done it. It is not hard to do. You choose the words that people might be looking for (major subjects, people, brands, species or whatever applies to you book). You use word-search to find each reference to these and add the page number. You work down from the most to least important topics until you meet the maximum number of lines specified by the publisher. It is time consuming, but far from difficult.

I would not pay for it because a professional indexer only knows which words you use a lot, not what subjects are important for the book and of interest to your readership.

Also, be honest--is that indexing fee a drop in the bucket of your future royalites, or a huge cut out of them? I would rather contribute my efforts (that is what an author does) than my money (that is what a self-publisher does).

There are cross-reference programs (the "literature term" for this is concordance) that scan text and output a sorted list of EVERY word and the place (by page number and line if it knows page breaks) of every occurrence, and doing that might be a good starting point. You would immediately want to delete the entries for common English words such a, an, and, the - you'd likely delete MOST of the words indexed. I'd think such a program meant for book indexing would already have a list of common words it deletes from the output, but you would want to look over such a list (common words used in your book, not ALL common words!) to check if some common word has a special or technical meaning in your book.

But the remainder would be quite close to the final index.

On the other hand, being "utterly ignorant" and the publisher waiting on it, it might be better to have the publisher have this done.

Then again, I just did a Google search on book indexing program

I just used MSWord's "find" function because I only planned to do this once--so I didn't think significant time would be saved learning a whole new program. YMMV. It took me about 1 day to do for a full sized textbook.

I've done indexing for UC Press and U Chicago. I don't do it anymore

But if the press has someone on staff who's good, it's worth the money. My supervisors at both presses expected all indexers to actually read the book, and to use a special concordance program that was written by someone at UC Press.

The part that's a headache for most people at university presses they have very rigid guidelines about indexing and formatting. Sometimes they have a spdific thesaurus you have to use, in conjunction with the concordance.

Following the formatting and usage guidelines can be a PITA.

It depends a lot on the nature of the book and what they want.

My 60-k word non-fic book (which was a how-to business book) turned out to be astonishingly easy to index. The publisher didn't want me to put page numbers because the book had to be set; they said they would add those if I provided the key words.
I made a list of key words that I thought were important, a list of of all the companies mentioned, and submitted those.

Took me a few hours, max, because I *knew* what would be important. I went through the book with an open Excel spreadsheet, and kept adding words to it - with a separate list for company names. When I was done, I sorted them alphabetically and sent it off.

If they want you to put in page numbers, it's much more time consuming, of course.

So I guess the important thing is to find out what exactly they want.

I recommend writing into your contract that you will do the index because then your publisher can't decide to cheap out and not have one (look at how many books today don't) or tell you to "put it on your website." When I wrote my first book many moons ago, an older writer friend gave me a method for doing the index that is definitely low tech but works very well. First, you buy a whole lot of index cards. I would start with 1,000. When you receive the page proofs back from your publisher, you can do the index, but not before. Start on the first page. When you see something that you think ought to be indexed, take an index card and write "Smith, Joe, ax murderer, p. 1" and drop it in a box. Similarly for "Smith, Joe, p. 2" and so on. When the box fills up, get another box. When you reach the end of the manuscript, open a new document in your word processing software and pull a card from the box and input the information. Then grab another card and input that information in proper alphabetical order. When you reach the last card in the last box, your index is complete. It works. And it's cheap. Indexing software is expensive, several hundred dollars, and (I believe) only available for Windows computers.

I worked with a professional indexer on a giant non-fiction title and he was worth his money. On the simple level there is software that finds the most common words and generates a list (disallowing the, is, on, etc). This kind of index you can do yourself but it's going to be low-rent.

The conceptual level indexing requires time and understanding and no program has been developed to pick up what you need. A paragraph might be tangentially referring to a index term without ever using it or being near an appearance of the phrase in text. That is where the human indexer comes in.

The index is really important because if it isn't easy to find information then the book won't get used. It won't have a chance of being the dominant title in the field.

I'd ask to see the Indexer invoices though. Check that they were paid what the Publisher are charging you.

I created my own index. Perhaps I am missing something, but it was pretty easy. I used Adobe Indesign to create my book, watched an online video how to do it, and created my index. It looks just like an index should, includes all the proper names in the book and looks fine using the Indesign default fonts.

I've done this several times, using the Index function in Word Perfect. It's not difficult, but can be time-consuming, depending on how thorough you want it to be.

Indexing is a bitch. Do not underestimate the time it takes. To do it well, it's like reading a book five times, taking copious notes for every page.

caw

A book called Indexing Books by Nancy C. Mulvany treats the subject thoroughly. She addresses the conceptual process along with the rest. Although I haven't indexed a book, I'm glad I read it. There's a lot involved in creating a high quality index.

mathewferguson said:

....
The conceptual level indexing requires time and understanding and no program has been developed to pick up what you need. A paragraph might be tangentially referring to a index term without ever using it or being near an appearance of the phrase in text. That is where the human indexer comes in.

The index is really important because if it isn't easy to find information then the book won't get used. It won't have a chance of being the dominant title in the field...

Click to expand...

I agree with Mathew Ferguson on this. A good index is hard to do. It's not a question of just picking out words from the text and saying what pages they are on. The key point is figuring out which terms the reader is likely to look for. This is harder than it sounds.

As for the price, $1500 is not excessive for a 90k book, IF an experienced, reputable indexer is used. $3 a page seems to be standard for typical trade non-fiction. But, make sure the money is being spent on someone qualified. Most professional indexers seem to belong to the ASI (American Society of Indexers.)

By the way, I'm not a book indexer, but my sister has been a professional indexer for about a decade. She's done probably 500 or more books by now. Indexers work on very tight schedules, and without a lot of experience, it'll be hard to do a decent index in the amount of time that most publishers allot, unless the book is very straight-forward.