I’ve occasionally written about how authors obsess over indices, or indexes, for their books.These days most things are looked up electronically, but this entire week my reading, writing, and relaxing time have been taken up with the index for Nightmares with the Bible.Creating an index is an odious yet perversely enjoyable task.Most publishers (at least among the academic crowd) foist this duty onto the author since a freelancer can easily add $4,000 or $5,000 to the book’s budget.After preparing an index you can understand why.At least I get to work with searchable PDFs, but I remember doing indexes on paper and having to sort through printed proofs and hoping that you’d catch every instance or a word or phrase.The searchable PDF helps, but it depends on the material you’ve got to work with.
The Bible, for instance.Not only are many book names short—Job, John, Mark, James—they are also common.People have named their kids after biblical characters, or with biblical names, for millennia.Not only that, but Job can be job.Unless you put the quotes around it “Eve” will show up on just about every page, believe it or not.The real strain on the eyes comes from those terms that are important and show up throughout the book.Words like “Israel,” or “monster,” or “priest.”I’m not one of those people who writes a book about demons and puts “demons” in the index, though.Hey, if you know that’s what the book is about, why look in the index?Just read it!
Meanwhile, the cover copy came this week for my approval.I haven’t seen the cover proof yet, but last time I actually had time to check (several days ago now) other media outlets had picked up on the imminent arrival of a new book.It wasn’t on Goodreads the last time I looked, but there’s time for that.Right now there’s no time for anything, however, other than indexing.It actually takes longer to do this than it does to read the proofs for the book.And indexing helped me discover a spelling error that had gone past both me and the copyeditor.So this is a valuable exercise, but there are many other things to do as the weather turns cooler and other projects are aching for attention.Four days of intensive indexing and I’m only up to the “p”s.I’ve been away from it too long, so I’d better mind my “q”s as well.
