Like a lot of people, my journey to book indexing was kind of circuitous. After I finished my PhD in literature, I pursued the traditional academic path. When that didn’t work out, I changed gears and started freelance editing. A few months into that, a good friend hit me up and asked, “Have you ever done a book index before? I know someone who needs to hire someone to do it for her book.”
I had no idea how to do an index. I knew what a good one was, but I didn’t know how they were made. But I said yes, because I needed the work. Since then, I’ve indexed nearly 200 books.
I’m writing this because I’m always surprised by how many people don’t know what an index is or how it’s done. Let’s start with a definition: A back-of-the-book index is the alphabetical list at the end of a book that sends readers to the pages where a term or idea appears.
When it comes to creating an index, a lot of authors – maybe some of you reading this – end up facing a choice. Publishers these days almost never provide indexes, especially smaller ones. They tell the author: “Your book needs an index, it’s your responsibility. You can either do it yourself or you can hire a professional indexer. Otherwise, the book gets published without any index at all.”
How to make an index for a book
Here’s how I do it, at a high level. Usually I’m in a room at my desk, looking at a computer, indexing a book all by myself, listening to loud music. I was really into punk rock as a kid, and still am, so you get the picture.
Then I read the book. I use Acrobat to read the PDF, and as I read through it I flag terms and put them in the index. I use Microsoft Word to write the index. There are indexers out there who use various forms of software, but I never really have. I’ve just done it the old-fashioned way, I guess you’d say.
This involves searching the PDF of a book’s proof pages and determining one-by-one which terms and their occurrences deserve to go in the index and which do not; manually typing in all index entries and subentries, and all the page numbers for them; constantly checking the alphabetization of the index while it’s in progress; making sure that I haven’t created circular cross-references or left anything out… You get the picture.
What to flag as you read
The hard part is deciding what deserves to be in the index. What makes an index really valuable is a combination of different factors. You’ve got to have the details of the subject matter of the book, and you also have to pay attention to the bigger issues that underlie an author’s argument and make that book what it is.
It’s a holistic kind of activity. You can’t just look at the philosophical stuff. You can’t just look at the more surface-level stuff either and include one or the other in the index. You’ve got to have all of it.
When I started getting anthropology books to index, I didn’t have the knowledge the ethnographer authors had from all their field work. But because of all those years in higher education, I knew the theoretical structure of the arguments they were making inside and out. After that it was a matter of being a good reader and picking up on the things I didn’t know as I read.
If you’re the author, you already know your subject better than anyone. But the other part of the challenge is keeping track of the bigger ideas that support your argument. I’ve learned from a lot of experience that this is the part to keep your eye on. For example, in a book about literature, the word “novel” might appear very frequently. But the index should not include all of them. It should include any time there is a discussion of “the novel” as a literary genre or form, but not when referring to a specific book as “the novel.” And, of course, the index should never include “novel” when used as an adjective (meaning “new”).
Where first-timers get stuck
Indexing is not a trivial task. You need the readerly skills as well as the knowledge base to understand the book and think about it on all its levels, and not everyone is able to combine all those things. Even the brilliant authors whose books I index aren’t always able to do it very well themselves.
Authors who try indexing often end up drowning in some unfamiliar labor that is way more daunting than they expected. That can leave you with a confusing or unfinished index. It also takes time. I usually get paid about $1,800 on average for an index, and it takes me anywhere from 40 to 80 hours, depending on the length of the book. When I was starting out, it took me much longer.
Quality matters, too. Readers check the index to see whether a book is actually about what they want it to be about before they decide to buy it. An index ends up being an unexpectedly important part of a book’s marketability and sales.
It took me a while to get good at this. My first index was for a book on a topic close to what I’d studied, and I was still pretty nervous, because I’d never made an index in my life. I had to go on my feeling of what I thought would be good. I took the entire time I was allotted, probably three or four weeks, and I think it turned out well.
The next one was a friend’s first book, on 18th-century English literature, which I’d never studied. I’m a Latin Americanist. Again I took the full time, because I wanted to make sure the index was really, really good. I kept doing that over and over until, maybe five or six years in, I started to feel really confident about my skills as an indexer.
You’re not alone
If your first index is harder than you expected, you’re in good company. I was nervous about my first, and a little nervous about my second.
Indexers have communities you can find online. The American Society for Indexing, the Society of Indexers in the UK, and the Indexing Society of Canada are a few, and they’re a good place to learn what the craft involves.
There is also book indexing software. SeeAlso is the one I built to help authors and others starting out, or anyone trying to do it faster — here’s how it works. Remember that however daunting it feels at first, it can be done. Like a lot of things, the best thing to do is just get started.
I hope this helps. I wrote this because I love books. I love scholarship. I love small publishers and I want them to succeed. I want readers to have the best quality books that they can get. Through videos, writing, and the SeeAlso software, my goal is to help anyone create an index and get more books in front of readers.