A professional indexer could be the difference between a high-selling book and a low-selling book. How so?

A professional indexer will work with the author and publisher to create an index that reaches the target audience for your book. By identifying your target audience, the indexer is able to use terms and phrases well suited for the knowledge and experience level of your readers.

A professional indexer uses software specially designed to create indexes. Many word-processing software programs can automatically generate an index. However, this index is usually a string of page references that many times doesn’t help the reader in his or her search. Would you rather have this:

FBI, 3, 8, 24, 35, 42, 45, 60, 128

Or this:

FBI

Cold War and, 42, 45

history of, 3, 8

Hoover’s involvement with, 24, 128

qualifications necessary for joining, 35, 60

A reader who uses the automatically generated index to learn about “joining the FBI” will waste time looking on pages 3, 8, 24, 42, 45, and 128. However, the professionally created index directs them immediately to pages 35 and 60.

Lastly, a professional indexer is available to update your index should you have revisions, deletions, or additions to your text. The dedicated indexing software helps make these corrections and additions a seamless, easily completed task.