How Freelance Indexers Help Your Book Succeed

How Freelance Indexers Help Your Book Succeed Can Non-Fiction Authors Create Their Own Indexes? Maria Sosnowski has been a freelance indexer for over ten years. In this article, she explains that hiring an indexer to create a professional index is something that many authors neglect:  they either don’t think about an index at all, or they decide that the book doesn’t really need an index. This is a mistake that could cost you access to entire markets.Libraries, Bookstores, and Amazon SalesDo you want your book to sell more easily? A good index is an important feature that librarians will look out for. Some libraries won’t consider purchasing non-fiction books without an index. Readers will often head to the back matter first and browse the index first to see what the book is about; those who want to look up something will go straight to the index. Without indexes, books are seen as less polished, which lowers the chance that a library system will select it for purchase.The same thing is true with bookstores. Buyers will skim the index to see if certain to pics are covered in the book. If they can’t see what they are looking for, they will move on to another title on the shelf. The lack of an index can result in a lack of sales.When you sell your book on Amazon, the Look Inside feature allows buyers to check out sample pages from your book, read the table of contents, and browse the index. A missing index is a missed opportunity to convince someone that your book is exactly what they’re looking for. A missing index is a missed opportunity to tell someone your book is what they’re looking for. And how would you like to optimize your online listing for searches? You can add â€Å"tags† with keywords and phrases to make it easier for Amazon to target the right audience, which will naturally increase book sales. While you can certainly try to create your own tags, an index will naturally contain most of these keywords and phrases. It’s an easy and effective hack! A search function can’t separate the wheat from the chaff. It can’t distinguish between an in-depth discussion and a passing mention of a term. It doesn’t capture synonyms where multiple words are used for the same concept. It doesn’t capture homographs where they same word has different meanings. It doesn’t consider context, either, so it would treat a discussion about Abraham Lincoln just the same as a sentence that uses Lincoln’s term in office to mark the timeline for the real topic.Adding value to your bookSearching provides too many hits, while not providing enough quality hits. There is no analysis in a search. Professional indexers analyze the text as they read, create a structured index with multiple access points into the material in the form of cross-references, and use subheadings to break down the page ranges about a particular topic. They can group related information and concepts together, even when varying terminology is used. Just as important, they will leave out extraneous information, casual mentions of a topic that lack any depth, duplicative material, and other things that would frustrate a reader who’s trying to learn more about your topic. In short, professional indexers raise the value of the book.To find out more about Maria Sosnowski and the other top freelance indexers, head to the Reedsy Marketplace and get a free quote today.If you have any experience about indexing to share, or questions to ask Maria, just drop a message in the comments below.