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Subject:Re: professional indexers From:jhedtke -at- OZ -dot- NET Date:Sat, 31 Dec 1994 13:55:07 PDT
> I just got a call from the publisher who hired me to create the index for
> a business technology book on globalization. The good news is that the
> editor loves the index. The bad news is that the compositor informed her
> today that "the index is too big." The publisher wants to limit the
> size of the book to some predetermined page count, so ... they'll
> probably eliminate part of an Appendix, and they want me to reduce the
> size of my index to about 50% of what it is now. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!
> I was so proud of the work I did on that index; it just kills my soul to
> think of editing it to half its current size (which represents about 5%
> of the text).
I have this problem a lot. I frequently do the indexing for my books (or else
my publisher charges me for it). The amount of money I save isn't usually
worth it by itself, but it's very satisfying to do a really good index for one
of my books.
The problem I've had is that I usually do an index that's about 12% of the page
count of the book (avg of 20-25 raw entries/page), and the publisher rarely has
that kind of room. I had to trim the index on my last book down to a final
size of 2800 entries from about 6200 entries to make it fit in the signatures.
<sigh> Well, there's always the personal satisfaction of doing a good job.
:)
