20 February 2024 I am not one to traditionally wax poetic about war (especially right now). Even less likely am I to get dewy eyed at the mere description of battleships. And yet here I sit, indexing a military history book, and finding myself needing… Read More »Indexing Reflections: Battleship Names
13 February 2024 Or makes it better, I suppose. Depends on how you look at it. All I can say is that Hamilton makes it very hard not to break out in song when indexing a book on the American Revolution. With every mention of… Read More »Pop Culture Ruins Indexing
So it turns out, doing your due diligence to find out if your spouse was dead in the seventeenth century, thus permitting you to remarry within the Church, required a trip to Veracruz. Of course, this assumes you’re already in the Caribbean. Pretty sure if… Read More »TIL: Due Diligence
Finally, you can see the finish line. You’ve spent months if not years writing your book, sent it through multiple rounds of editing, from the developmental to copyediting, and now it’s in the final stage of proofreading before being sent to the printer. All that’s left is to review the proofs and append that index. No sweat. You know what you wrote, how hard can it be to run a quick search in Word for the key ideas and alphabetize them? Heck, even a grad student can do it!
You could do that, but both you and your publisher are likely to be unhappy with the end result.