Published article
> Customer experience, client communication
A portion of my indexing work is for authors whose publishers do not provide indexing services. With a single exception, my author-clients have been a delight to work with. Only one, in 15 years, was exceedingly difficult. After completing her project, my vow to prevent that experience also helped me improve the way I communicate with all authors. I gathered strategies from other well-known indexers and wrote this article for our regional indexing chapter. It was later published in national and international indexing journals.
The following are excerpts from the full article.
The following are excerpts from the full article.
Before the Index
Before accepting an indexing job for an author, a few strategies will set the foundation for a successful project.
1. Understand the author’s mindset and your role in the relationship. They’ve just completed an exhausting process and are heavily invested into this work. The book will likely be reviewed by their peers and possibly a much broader audience, which is both exciting and nerve-wracking. Margie Towery empathizes with the author’s stress. During the proofing and indexing stages, she says, “they are often dealing with the book cover and other final details, and often have a full-time teaching load, plus family issues of their own.” Kate Mertes adds, “The author is handing you their baby, which they’ve spent years of research on. To us it’s a project that we’ll be finished with in a month or less and on to the next thing. It’s important to remember what the work means to them.”
It’s always been the case that authors are surprised to learn how much is involved in the indexing process. Like anything else, it looks easy until you have to dig into it more deeply. Thus, indexers have always expected to educate authors on some of the usability considerations behind our indexing choices. But these days, as more and more research happens via online searching, authors may be even further distanced from standard indexing conventions, and they’re likely to assume more of the indexing process is automated than is actually the case. . . .
The Author Review
Having an author review an index you’ve created can be wonderful when the author is engaged in working toward an excellent index, says Naomi Linzer, who also notes that it can also be very challenging if the author doesn’t understand the basics of indexing. Kate Mertes recalls an editor’s term for authors with a lot of questions and suggestions: “high-energy tinkerers.” Mertes says high-energy tinkerers “can be a lot of fun to work with (and probably help produce the best indexes), but they can also be exhausting.” How to make the review process as productive and painless as possible for all involved? It starts before the author even opens the index draft file.
Sending the Review Draft
If you’ve provided links to the index evaluation resources with your initial project summary, your author has a head start on a productive review. When sending the index draft, Kate Mertes says, “I’ve started to send a pretty detailed email covering the review process.” In the email, Mertes links to tips for index evaluation in her website FAQs (see “Once the index is done, how do I know if it’s any good?” and others). Margie Towery anticipates questions the author might have during review, such as the handling of author citations, footnotes, or chapter authors in a book of collected works. She also suggests a review process that emphasizes paying attention to structure. Mertes tells her authors, “If you see a consistent practice you don’t understand, ask me, rather than trying to ‘fix’ it. I usually have a good reason for what I do and I’m happy to explain it.” She’s found that this saves time for both the author and herself. . . .
© 2014 Heartland Chapter of ASI. Used with permission.