Indexing Services

*2020 winner of the Ewart-Daveluy Indexing Award for excellence in indexing, awarded by the Indexing Society of Canada

You have finished the long process of writing your book, getting it edited, and having it published. Now the page proofs have come back to you from the publisher for both proofreading AND indexing at the same time - usually with a four-week deadline. This is a monumental task, and I can take on the indexing task for you, which is the most time-consuming and difficult part of this last stage in publishing.
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Professional indexing involves much more than a computer-generated concordance. Proper indexing requires careful reading and analysis of your book's content in order to determine key concepts and how they relate to one another. This type of intense study of your work will lead to a well-crafted and useful back-of-book index for your readers' reference. 

I love to gather and organize information. As a scholarly researcher, I am accustomed to managing lengthy and complex research and writing projects. As a professional indexer and member of the Indexing Society of Canada, I apply those same skills to your book by meticulously reading and analysing your content to create a carefully composed and useful back-of-the-book index. I specialize in scholarly and academic materials (Humanities, Social Sciences, Business), including complex documentation and multilingual texts, in a range of fields and disciplines: literature, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, sociology, political science, economics, business.

I also offer indexing services for English texts containing Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, (limited) German, and (limited) Arabic content.

​I use CINDEX designated professional indexing software.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND. INDISPENSABLE

I highly recommend Carla DeSantis as an indexer. Her knowledge of Spanish and Latin were indispensable for my coedited volume Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. In addition to her indexing skills, she caught many small copyediting errors. 

Sarah E. Owens, Professor

Examples of a my indexing work include (links are to Amazon.com; please use the "Look inside!" feature to view the index):

• Henry Berlin. Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming (294 pp.).
• Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens, eds. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. Toronto: University of Press, 2021 (262 pp.).
• Diana Aramburu. Resisting Invisibility: Detecting the Female Body in Spanish Crime Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019 (261 pp.).
• Brian C. Gunia. The Bartering Mindset: A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering Your Next Negotiation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019 (328 pp.). ​
• Heather Bamford. Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018 (272 pp.).
• Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati. Ethics of War and Peace in Iran and Shi‘i Islam. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016 (351 pp.).

N.B. I write traditional back-of-book indexes from PDF page proofs; I do not create embedded indexes in MS Word.

​Please see my listing with the Indexing Society of Canada.

CONTACT ME FOR MORE DETAILS

What Is the Process for Working Together?

1. Contact me with the details of your project and your time frame as soon as you receive the production schedule from your managing editor. The date that you will receive your first proof pages is the date that indexing can begin. It is important to book your indexing in advance in order to guarantee availability.

2. Once availability has been determined, I will ask you to send a copy of the manuscript in question via email so that I can assess the content and provide you with an accurate estimate for indexing.

3. Once we come to an agreement, I will book off the time for your index in my schedule. When you receive your first page proofs, you will send them to me in PDF format via email and indexing will commence.

4. When indexing is completed, I will email you the index in the preferred format (usually an MS Word document), which you can then review and pass on to the publisher.