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Does Your Document Need an Index

Jump to: [ Authors' Perspectives || The Bottom Line: Impact on Sales || Automated, Computer-Generated Indexes ]

"If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalog."

The above quote is from Consumer's Guide Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1897. If a professional indexer doesn't write an index for your book, you might want to consider adding a note like this one to your index. After all of your hard work, painstakingly writing your book, don't shoot yourself in your foot by excluding an index. Or worse, by including a less-than-useful index. (I feel this is worse because it gives your readers a false sense of security. They might trust your index to cover all issues after finding some topics in it, but after using it to find other topics, they'll be extremely frustrated by its inconsistencies.)

Authors' Perspectives

David Holzgang wrote an article for TidBits, in which he explains the importance of a professionally-written index from his perspective as an author:
The index for a book is one of the most important features that the book has. As a reader, I find a good index makes using a book a pleasure and a poor index makes finding anything a real chore. As a result, I usually ask publishers to let me pick a professional indexer and pay for the index out of my royalty account. This gives me some control over the index quality and ensures that I end up with an index that contributes to the book... Generally, in my experience, the worst indices are those prepared by authors. Indexing is a specialized skill, and deserves respect. (And, if you think authors work under deadline pressures, consider the indexer who generally has no more than a few days to index the book completely.)
Lillian R. Rodberg in her article for the Textbook Authors Association titled "The Index as Marketing Tool" addresses an author's point of view on how indexes impact sales. Here's an excerpt:
If you expect your publication to be used after the initial reading, you must invest in a well-designed index tailored not only to your publication, but to your users' needs. Your information does little good if you don't provide easy access to it. Publishers of computer and technical manuals must remember that because there is usually no cover-to-cover reading of your publications, your indexes will determine how useful readers find your documents.

The Bottom Line: Impact on Sales

Good indexes impact sales. Need proof?

Keep these factors in mind as you work on locating indexers with the expertise you're after.

Automated, Computer-Generated Indexes

Many folks new to indexing have heard that computers can write indexes for them - some word processing and DTP software have index- or concordance-generation features that provide you with tools that might make a writer's job easier (like producing a list of words to include in an index), but the content (phrasing, structure, and all other content) must be provided by a writer. If you do use this feature in your software, someone will still have to do a lot of work building hierarchical structures and access points (like cross-references and double-posts).

One aspect of language that software doesn't pick up on is inference. For example, when texts discuss meal plans for dogs, software might include entries for "meal plans" and for "dogs," but it can't see that a human looking for information on canine nutrition and diet would find that passage useful. Humans can, though, and people trained in indexing would create useful cross-references or double-posts from related or synonymous terms, perhaps from "canine" to "dogs," and from "nutrition" and "diet" to "meal plans."

Software also doesn't yet have the capability to create structures that human readers would expect to find in indexes. For example, a business text might discuss voicemail, answering machines, cell phones, and text messenging, but might never use the term "communications." Computer software won't relate those topics, but humans trained in indexing might consider doing so. Human indexers will consider whether or not readers of the text at-hand would be likely to look under a broader topic like "communications," and if so, they'll build in a hierarchical structure using subentries or by using a general cross-reference telling readers to "see specific types of communication.

As you can see, concordance- and index-generation features of word processing software doesn't replace the need for a professional indexer any more than spell-checking replaces the need for a professional editor.

The topic of automated and semi-automated indexing is explored in the following:

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