What an Index Is, Who Builds It, and When

Manuscripts and books · 741 words · about 3 minutes to read

Cornell University Press asks authors to submit a final manuscript containing everything that will be in the published book, and then names one exception: an index, which will be created later.¹

That parenthesis is the whole subject of this article, and it explains a scheduling problem that catches most first-time authors. Every other part of a book must exist before production begins. The University of Chicago Press states the general rule plainly: anything an author plans to have in the book must be submitted before copyediting, including all art.² The index is excluded because it cannot exist yet.

An index is about pages, and pages do not exist until late

The reason is mechanical rather than editorial. An index entry points at a page number, and page numbers are produced by typesetting. A manuscript has no pages in the sense an index needs, only a word count and a sequence.

That places indexing in the same class as one other operation. Editors Canada defines proofreading as examining material after layout or in its final format. The definition covers correcting errors in textual and visual elements, checking adherence to the design, and verifying cross-references, running heads, and hyperlinks.³ Both jobs wait for the same event, and both are squeezed by the same delay when it slips.

An author who has budgeted time for everything up to typesetting has usually budgeted nothing for the two things that happen after it. Both then land in the same fortnight.

What an index is not

It is not a list of every occurrence of every word. Software can produce that, and the result is longer than an index, harder to use, and full of entries nobody was looking for. The distinction is not a matter of polish.

The difference is that an index records what a book discusses rather than what it mentions. A page where a subject is named in passing and a page where it is examined are not equivalent, and only a reader can tell them apart. The same reader has to decide what a subject should be called when the book calls it four things, and which of the four the reader looking it up will try first.

Those are judgments about the book's content. They are closer to the work a structural editor does than to anything a proofreader does, which is one reason indexing is a separate trade rather than a stage of copy editing.

It is priced as a separate trade, because it is one

The Editorial Freelancers Association's 2026 rate chart lists book indexing at 2.0 to 2.5 cents a word, or $55.00 to $60.00 an hour, or a pace of 6.0 to 8.0 pages an hour.⁴ Those figures sit alongside the editorial levels rather than inside them.

Read the per-page pace against a page count and the schedule becomes visible. A 320-page book is roughly forty to fifty working hours of indexing, and that time falls in the window between page proofs and the printer, which is the shortest window in the whole production calendar.

Two consequences follow for anyone planning. The index has to be commissioned before proofs arrive rather than after. The specification also moves the price, because an index covering notes, figures, tables, and appendixes is a larger job than one covering the main text alone.

Where an editor helps, and where an indexer is the right person

An editor working on the manuscript can do three things that make an index cheaper later. All three happen months before an indexer is engaged.

The first is settling terminology. A book that calls one thing by three names will produce three entries or an indexer's query. That decision belongs on the style sheet during copy editing rather than in a hurry during proofs.³

The second is fixing the apparatus. Notes, figures, tables, and appendixes are all indexable material, and a manuscript whose numbering is inconsistent hands that inconsistency to the indexer.

The third is flagging what the book actually discusses. A structural report that names the book's recurring subjects is not an index, and it is the document an indexer would otherwise have to build from scratch.

What an editor does not do is decide what a book is about for indexing purposes, or judge which mentions deserve entries. Those are the indexer's judgments, made with the author.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, proofs, and correspondence with a press. Our book editing and manuscript proofreading are quoted on the whole document, and the style sheet comes back with the work.

An author with a publication date should put two entries in the calendar rather than one. Proofs, and the index that cannot start until they arrive.

References

Cornell University Press, Author Guidelines. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/author-guidelines/ ↩
University of Chicago Press, Manuscript Preparation Guidelines. https://press.uchicago.edu/resource/emsguide.html ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
Editorial Freelancers Association, 2026 Editorial Rate Chart. https://www.the-efa.org/rates/ ↩

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