Page Proofs and Indexing, Oh Boy!

The page proofs for Magnetic Woman arrived a week or so ago, which means that for the month of June my life will be largely occupied with checking for errors and, in particular, creating the index.

Authors always get the chance to check for mistakes, and some people are better at that than others. As a former proofreader, I'm fairly good, but it's always dangerous to proofread your own work without someone else also taking a look. Still, I've already noticed a few things that will need fixing.

As for indexing, nonfiction usually ought to be indexed, and as University of Pittsburgh Press is a scholarly press, I did not have to make a case for why my book needs an index. However, there was the question of whether the press would hire an indexer (and charge me for it), whether I would hire an indexer (and hope it would cost less than the press's charge), or whether I would do the index myself.

I have never previously indexed a book, but--having been a writer for many years and also worked some in publishing--I had a good general idea of what was involved. I knew I was capable of the job, assuming I had enough time. But were there exciting new ways of accomplishing the task?

I asked around, and learned that there are indeed various software tools, some of them in my word processor. (I wrote the book in Nota Bene and submitted it in Word, but it is now in pdf.) But indexing remains largely something done in one's mind rather than with software, because while software can easily create a concordance, a good index deals heavily with ideas, many of which are not identified by name at every occurrence in the text. While, if I were a professional indexer, I might want to invest in special software to speed the task, the cost and learning curve didn't seem worth it to index this and the small number of other scholarly books I expect to publish.

It turned out that writers of my acquaintance on Facebook who responded to my inquiry did their indexing in pretty much the same way as the job has traditionally been done, except that not all of them used index cards, preferring to type the entries directly into a Word document, where the entries can easily be edited. Once I learned this, I decided that yes, I would do my own indexing and that simple methods are often easiest and best.

And so, at this point I have reached page 75, which means 95 pages indexed as the front matter takes up 20. I find that I can index pretty well for most of a morning (depending on how many interruptions and to what extent my neighbors are producing construction and lawn-care noise), but it's not quick work because each page has so many things to index. Luckily, my temperament seems well suited to doing this amount of indexing. I would hate to spend all day indexing, but I find that three or four hours of indexing per day (at least on my own book) is kind of enjoyable. The part I like least is trying to deal with topics that are huge throughout the book, like Toyen, surrealism, and the avant-garde. These have to be broken down into sub-entries (as do many other topics, of course), but that still can be complicated.

However, for the most part I'm just happily working away each morning and waiting to hear back from Artists Rights Society about copyright clearance. Because yeah, even dead artists' work isn't necessarily out of copyright, and Toyen's art will be under copyright for decades to come.