Indexing Services Editing and Proofreading Services

An index is a piece of writing that anticipates questions. The indexer reads a finished book and works out what a reader will come looking for, in the words the reader will use rather than the words the author chose, and builds a structure that gets them there in one move. It is done late, under a deadline set by everything that has already slipped, and it is the part of a book most likely to be cut to save four pages — which is why so many books ship with a concordance of nouns and call it an index.

We edit what indexers, publishers and packagers produce — back-of-book indexes across scholarly, trade and reference titles, index specifications and briefs for freelancers, entry and subentry structures, cross-reference systems, name and subject authority decisions, embedded indexing markup for reflowable formats, index style guides and house conventions, multi-volume and cumulative index planning, thesaurus and controlled vocabulary documentation, indexer agreements and rate structures, and guidance for authors who are indexing their own books. Our editors work to your house style and the density your extent allows.

The difference between an index and a word list is the subentry, and it is where a rushed job shows immediately. An entry reading "climate change, 12, 44, 47, 51–68, 71, 88, 92, 104" has told the reader that the book is about climate change, which they knew. We build these so any entry with more than about five locators is broken into subentries that name what is actually discussed at each place, so the subentries are phrased as the reader's question rather than as the author's section heading, so cross-references point to terms the reader might plausibly try first — the popular name, the older term, the term used in the neighbouring discipline — and so a locator range means the discussion genuinely runs across those pages rather than being mentioned on two of them. We also check that every see reference lands somewhere and that no see also loops back on itself, which are the two errors that survive proofreading because nobody reads an index in order.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished page proofs and material under embargo. We are editors rather than subject specialists in every field we index, and we work from the text rather than from outside knowledge. What we can do is make an index that answers questions, fits the extent you have, and holds together as a structure.