I am a notorious time management junkie, one of those people who procrastinates by reading blogs about doing everything better and faster, whose favorite thing about the Harry Potter universe is Hermione’s time-turner. Talk about multitasking! Multitasking is one thing I don’t do well—and I think we’re all starting to realize it’s not a good tactic. In the […]
The Gift of Quality to Effective Indexing
I’ve tried searching for something on the Web using keywords or phrases and been given a list, which although it’s filtered through a “relevance” algorithm, still gives me mostly irrelevant content. Some folks say it’s just me being lazy with my search terms and that I should go to the advanced search options to narrow […]
Mirror, Mirror: Matching the Index to the Text
There are various metaphors for an index: a roadmap, web, a library catalog, a hallway full of doors. I even sometimes graph out an index, putting what I think of as “vertical topics” (chapters and main sections) on the y-axis and “horizontal topics” (the small incidental themes that pop up over and over throughout the book) […]
Setting Boundaries with Clients
After an interesting conversation with a PI partner on Skype, I looked back and saw a blog post on setting boundaries that needed expression. I remember from when I started my freelance book indexing business the feeling of not wanting to turn down any jobs, because, who knows if another one would show up to […]
Indexing Expertise: The Importance of Practice
Love reading nonfiction? Know quite a bit about a lot of subjects? Expert author in your field? It seems like these would be great preliminary qualifications for building indexes. And understanding of the subject matter is a very important prerequisite for indexing a book, although PhD-level expertise may not always be necessary. For example, I […]
Expert, Generalist, or Somewhere in Between?
One of the fun things about indexing — yes, it’s a fun job! — is learning about subjects I wouldn’t otherwise. In my spare time, I’d rather read a young adult novel than a book about party politics or programming apps. But on the job, I do read about just about every subject imaginable (indexers […]
