freelance indexing job, done

[redbird]

I let JM, the guy whose book I edited last summer, talk me into indexing it, even though I was fairly sure that a professional indexer would do a better job, and probably for less money. I asked why he wanted me to do this, and he said it was partly because I knew the book, after editing it (fair) and partly because he trusted me to do the job carefully and on time. (I accepted on the basis of an hourly rate, and that he understood he was paying me for the time I spent figuring out how to do this.)

I finished the index and sent it back to him yesterday afternoon, and am now going *thud*. That was on time--the deadline wound up being end-of-day today, defined as "it will be there by the time he wakes up Sunday morning." I am more drained than I expected, I think partly because I was doing this while dealing with significant hand pain.

I don't know whether I did a good job. I'm fairly sure that I don't want to add "indexing" to my set of editorial skills/work that I'm willing to do, both because I found it tedious and because if i did a good job on this index, that's significantly because I was already quite familiar with this book, in a way that indexers generally aren't before starting.

Today, I will stretch and exercise, and I'm not sure what else.

Comments

[calimac]

The books I've indexed I already either knew well from editing, as you did this one, or were easy to grasp in that the author had a nugget-collecting approach to the topic. When it's not a collection of nuggets, I find indexing extremely mentally exhausting, much more so than physically.

[otter]

I can certainly relate to the "thud" after completing such a task.

I hope you're able to rest and recover today

[kareina]

I remember wondering the first time I became aware that some books even have indexes (when I was still in grade school?) how they were created--how did they know which pages those words were on, and how did they know which words should be in the index, and why were the words I was interested in not in the index? These days I guess it would be much easier, as one can do a word search to discover all the pages that contain any given word, but how does one decide which words matter? That is still beyond me.

[carbonel]

I've indexed one document in my life, under much the same circumstances. (It was a technical writing job, though it was an update of an old document, not a written from new.) That was back in 1997 or so.

I think I did a decent job, but it was definitely not something I ever wanted to do again.