Indexing for Fun and Profit

What is a quality index?

Five different top-quality indexers will produce five different indexes for the same book, because of their own personal "style". A good quality index, however, is one which the reader finds easy to use and helpful.

An index is like an x-ray of a book. A good index will show the structure of the book - all the important ideas, concepts and subjects, and how they all fit together. It will also make all those things easy for a reader to find.

For that reason, a good index isn't a list of words (that's technically called a "concordance"). It's a guide to the ideas in the book.

This is why indexing is an art, rather than a science - or, to put it another way, this is why we still need humans to make indexes. Computers can find words; only a human brain can pick out ideas.

Backwords Indexing has more to say on this topic.

Our quality commitment

Indexing for Fun and Profit guarantees that any index you get from us will be:

• comprehensive - it will cover all the significant aspects of the book, and (in the case of a Full Index), clearly show how they relate to one another.
• useable - the index will be easy to use for readers to find all those significant topics.
• objective - the index will professionally and dispassionately set out the argument of the book, rather than offering opinions on its content.
• on time and on budget.