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Good indexes improve sales. Textbook adopters read indexes
when deciding on what books to buy for their classes. Librarians who are
responsible for buying thousands of books use indexes to make their
decisions; many libraries will not purchase nonfiction books without
indexes. The world's largest bookseller, Amazon.com, so values indexes
as a sales tool that they are now available for prospective purchasers to
examine. And we are all familiar with the usefulness (and guilty pleasures)
of the indexes to celebrity tell-all books. Is X in the index? How many pages
are devoted to Y's love life? Does Z get a mention?

Authors as their own indexers. Burnout almost inevitably follows
the massive creative push of completing a manuscript. The last thing most
authors are prepared to do is to spend additional days or weeks analyzing
the text and creating a user-friendly index. In addition, authors are usually
too familiar with their own words: they cannot put themselves in the position
of the reader who is seeing the concepts and ideas for the first time. A
good indexer serves as a go-between to introduce the author's work to
readers, and help them find the information they need.

"Why can't I use my computer's word processing
function to index my book?" As my colleague, Dick Evans, says,
"The computer can prepare the index to the same extent that the word
processing program can write the book." Computers (and indexing
programs) are tools used by professionals to create an index; these tools
are not capable of intelligent human thought.

The indexing function of a word processing program merely produces a
concordance: a list of words occurring in the text. In a book about dogs, for
example, the word "canine" will not be listed unless it actually appears in
the book--even though it may be the first word readers think of when looking
for a specific concept. "Afghan Hound" will appear (if it is in the text), but
not as a subentry under "dog breeds." And there will be literally hundreds of
undifferentiated locators (page numbers) under the term, "dog." In short,
this list will be an undigested, unanalyzed, and basically useless page-filler.

It takes a professional indexer to organize the material so that readers can
find what they want quickly and easily and provide an accurate key to the
author's concepts. No computer program can accomplish this task.

Indexing humor, for those who love wordplay. Scroll down for some very
amusing (and real) index entries.

Indexers Unlimited is a consortium of 50 professional, qualified indexers
available to bid on your projects.

The American Society of Indexers provides a comprehensive checklist for
working with a professional indexer to produce a quality index.