Information for authors

Has your publisher asked you to provide an index for your book, or are you self-publishing? If you've never worked with an indexer before, here's what you need to know.

Why hire a professional?
A good index adds tremendous value to your book — Martha Osgood of Back Words Indexing counts the ways here. A professional has the expertise and perspective to create an index that maps out your book's structure and content for your target readers. We are trained to consider who those readers will be, and how they might use the index to locate the information, so we can present it efficiently and effectively. For an author's point of view on indexing, see this post from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog.

The process
Working with an indexer should be a straightforward, easy process for authors. First, we'll discuss your project and I'll give you a cost estimate, based on your description of the book. Whenever you have sample pages in final page-design format, you can email me PDFs of a chapter or two plus the table of contents, and I'll give you a firm price quote. Rates vary depending on the project; find current rate information here.

Your publisher will probably have house indexing guidelines. If not, we'll need to agree on format and style - the look of the index. The simplest way to do this is for you to send me an example of an index whose format you want me to emulate.

Indexing is usually the last step in the production process before your book goes to the printer - because ideally, indexers need to work from final (or close-to-final) pages. If book design changes cause text reflow after indexing is done, it can be difficult and expensive to revise the index accordingly.     continued >>