27 August 2024
You hired a professional indexer, and now they’ve done the job and sent the index back to you. It’s a good idea to look it over to make sure the index does what you want it to, but how do you know if the indexing is succeeding? Here are some basic steps you can take to check that the index meets your needs and is ready to submit to the publisher. These steps are written from the perspective of how I index, and thus what you can expect to find (and not find) in one of my indexes. Your own indexer may take a slightly different approach (for example, they may in fact duplicate the table of contents in the index, whereas I do not). So be ready to adapt this to your own situation.
- Quickly scroll (or flip, if you’ve printed it out) through the index, stopping whenever something catches your eye. To a get a feel for the index, read a few random entries. Note anything that seems unusual to you.
- Look up any entries that don’t make sense. Can you suggest a better term? Your insights can improve the index. On the other hand, when it comes to questions about index structure, please ask why your indexer has chosen one technique over another.
- Think about the main topic of your book, then look up those terms in the index. Do they cover your material the way you’d expect? Do they point you to more information through cross-references? Keep in mind that cross-references are less like synonyms and more like Amazon’s recommendation algorithm. In creating them, indexers think about what other terms and ideas are in the index that a reader might be interested in if they’re looking in a given spot but wouldn’t necessarily know to look up. For example, in a book on post-Cold War Eastern Europe, the term communism might have cross-references to narratives, national belonging, and post-transition politics as well as to autocracy, democracy, and socialism. For more on the intricacies of cross-references and how indexers use them, see my blog post.
- Look at your table of contents. From that, what topics would you expect to see in the index? Looking at the index, are those topics included, either directly or through cross-references (keep in mind that phrasing may shift slightly, especially if the book is a collection of essays by different authors, and that not all indexers repeat the TOC in the index). Index entries do not reproduce the argument found in the book (though of course they help your reader navigate through your argument). This means that an index can include ideas the book argues against. For example, if you have written a book analyzing Socrates’s ideas in the Timaeus, you likely have included mention of opinions held by Socrates’s interlocutors. The index will include an entry for those arguments, even though they are contrary to Socrates’s own conclusions and your book’s argument.
- Look at the index for consistency in how topics are dealt with, including whether subheadings are clear.
- Spot-check a few entries to make sure that the locators take you to the correct page of the text. Please note that with an embedded index, this can be tricky depending on your settings. The terms in embedded indexes are associated directly with a word or phrase, so will produce the correct locators in the final typeset manuscript.