Why You Need a Professional Index

Why Do I Need An Index At All?

An index makes the detailed information in your book easy to access, enhancing the book's usefulness and making it more valuable to the reader. Librarians and book reviewers often examine the index as part of their review process. A quality index increase the quality of your book, which leads to increased sales. The lack of an index could disqualify your book for purchase.

Readers often want to refer back to a specific piece of information in your book. An index provides the tool that allows them to do that. It also helps a potential reader determine if a specific topic of interest is covered in the book.

Overall, an index enhances the reader experience.

Why Do I Need a Professional Index?

Professional indexers have the specific training, knowledge, and experience to produce the most useful index for your readers. Indexing requires many skills:

Analyzing content and meaning
Editing terms and concepts
Discriminating between significant terms and passing mentions
Organizing and grouping information into a logical structure
Identifying synonyms and cross-references
Paying attention to details
Proofreading

Indexing also requires much knowledge:

Index format and structure options
Alphabetization options
Publishing industry standards
Name and term sortation/alphabetization rules
Meeting space requirements

Having the above skills and knowledge ensures that your index will be ready to be published, comprehensive, and easy to use.

Why Not Have the Author Write the Index?

While authors are certainly the experts on the subjects of their books, most authors do not have the indexing skills, knowledge, and experience to produce a quality index. In addition, authors are often too close to their work to see it from a reader's perspective. A professional indexer takes a fresh look at the book and is better able to be objective in identifying the best access points to the large amounts of information scattered throughout it.

In addition, indexing is time consuming. After months or even years of research and writing, authors may be taxed for time. Hiring a professional relieves the stress of meeting a deadline and ensures a quality product. Professional indexers are used to working within the tight deadlines of the publishing industry.

Can't the Index Be Created by a Computer?

The answer is emphatically NO!! Computers use algorithmic analysis that can only generate concordances of words and terms used in books. They include the page number of every reference to the word or term, even if it is only a passing mention, wasting the time of the user. They also exclude information related to the term, when it is referred to by a synonym of the term.

Computers lack the intellectual analysis required to create well organized, logical, complete, and easy-to-use indexes. No computer software exists today that can produce a comprehensive index like one that can be created by a skilled indexer.

Below is an example of an index created by a computer versus by a professional indexer: