Article
March 10, 2019
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by Stephen

Tips for Taking a Sabbatical

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

Last week I wrote about what I accomplished during my sabbatical. I have also had some people ask how I was able to take the time off, as six weeks, or even four weeks, is a sizeable time commitment as well as lost income. So I want to cover some of those questions today, as I believe that a sabbatical is achievable with the right planning.

Setting a Date

Although I had been thinking about a sabbatical for probably over a year, I finally made the decision in early October of 2018. But I did not immediately stop work, mostly because I still had projects scheduled into December. So, I decided to start my sabbatical in January, when my schedule was clear. It was also nice that January coincided with the new year, and having a couple of months until my sabbatical started also gave me time to plan how I wanted to use that time.

What actually happened was that due to a couple of unforeseen circumstances, December was far busier than I anticipated and a few projects had to be pushed into January. This wasn’t too much of a problem because I simply pushed back the end date of my sabbatical, but it would have been nice to start on time. Next time I will be more watchful for potential scheduling issues.

Money Matters

This seems to be the question at the top of everyone’s mind: how were you able to afford to take the time off? I have to admit I did not put a lot of thought into the finances. My wife and I are fortunate to not have significant debt or a mortgage, and when I checked our bank account I saw that we had enough money to cover expenses for a couple of months without an income. 

If cash flow is an issue, I think a sabbatical is still possible with a savings plan in the months leading up to it. To paraphrase Michael Hyatt, from whom I got the inspiration for a sabbatical,  “What do I need to do in order to make this possible?” Framed this way, options can start coming to mind. 

Will My Clients Leave Me?

One fear I had to confront, which I think can be common among freelancers, is the fear that I will lose clients because I am not available. Personally, I have come to believe that this is a fallacy if you are an established freelancer with a good reputation. If clients want to work with you, they will come back when you are ready.

The other side of this fear is learning to become comfortable with missing out on work opportunities. This was surprisingly difficult because my default is to say yes, if my schedule is open and especially if it is a repeat client. There were a number of times when I had to remind myself that my calendar was actually full because I had a prior commitment to myself. 

During this sabbatical, I was not sure if I should tell my clients the reason I was unavailable. In the end, I did tell two of my clients and I was pleasantly surprised at how supportive they were. For other clients, I simply said that my schedule was already full and told them when I would be available again. I still ended up with a few projects booked for after my sabbatical, so my relationships with my clients seem to be alright.

Plan and Anticipate the Benefits

In the months leading up to my sabbatical, I created a list of possible goals and tasks that I wanted to accomplish. When I actually started my sabbatical, I then edited the list into a workable plan. While the sabbatical should not become another chore, I think spending a bit of time thinking through why you are making the time and how to achieve the benefits you are looking for will help make the sabbatical a more enjoyable and satisfying experience, even if the plan is simply to spend four weeks at the beach to unwind. Keeping the benefits in mind will also help with saying no to projects or with sticking to the financial planning to make the sabbatical possible.

In the end, for me, the sabbatical was definitely worth the planning and the temporary lack of income. I am already thinking of doing it again.

Article
March 4, 2019
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by Stephen

What I Accomplished During My Sabbatical

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Taking a sabbatical has been one of the best decisions I have made for my business. I am already thinking about doing it again next year.

For those of you who don’t know, I recently took nearly six weeks off work, from mid-January to the end of February. I did this for two main reasons: I was feeling overwhelmed and a bit burned out from a very busy year in 2018. I also realized that I no longer had a clear vision for what I wanted to accomplish through my work. When I first started freelancing, my goal was to earn enough money to support myself, and for a few years that was enough to keep work challenging. Now that I have moved beyond the start-up phase, I found that simply being busy was not enough. I needed a new challenge to focus on.

So my goal during this sabbatical was to figure out what that new thing should be. 

I thought the answer was going to be writing, because I do enjoy writing and as my wife can probably attest, it is something I frequently talk about. It is really because of writing that I sought to work in publishing in the first place. 

But looking deeper, the reason I enjoy writing—and why I enjoy indexing and blogging and introducing people to each other—is because I enjoy connecting people to new ideas and information. I enjoy being the facilitator who enables other people to accomplish what they need. 

Part of this shift, for me, came from listening to the audiobook version of Authority, by Nathan Barry. The book is about making the mindset shift from being highly proficient in your particular skill to becoming a teacher of that skill. Part of me quails at the thought of calling myself an indexing expert, especially knowing indexers who have ten, twenty, or even thirty years of experience over me. Yet I also have to acknowledge that I am no longer a novice and that I do have experience and knowledge that I can share. 

So this is my first pivot. I will continue to index, and I also want to find opportunities to share the indexing knowledge that I have.

I actually did just that during my sabbatical, by writing an email course on indexing. The course provides an overview of the components of an index and the indexing process, from the initial pre-planning to the final edit, in seven lessons delivered over seven days. It took me five and a half days to write and publish the course, and I have to admit I had a blast doing so. If you are interested, you can check it out here.

Writing is still important, though. The shift for me was to realize that while I still want to publish fiction, I am also just as happy writing nonfiction. Writing is one of the ways that I can teach and facilitate, in a more direct way than indexing (though indexing is also in service to the reader, making the text accessible). This is my second pivot, to be intentional this year about making writing part of my business. The finer details of how this will happen still need to be worked out, but I have a few ideas for writing projects and have dedicated 9-10 every morning to writing, to make sure that words are produced. 

I did some other things during my sabbatical too. Besides a week away visiting friends, I still showed up at my office almost every day. In addition to what I have already mentioned, I spent time brainstorming and writing a two page vision document; read several books to help me reflect on my work; worked my way through the exercises in the writing book Story Genius, by Lisa Cron, to improve my fiction; established a new daily and weekly schedule; and I finally finished setting up investments for retirement, which is something I started a year ago and then let fall to the wayside. In a way, I used this time to try out and practice new habits and new forms of work, such as writing the email course. Without this time, I would have felt too stressed and squeezed to invest the time and effort. I also made sure that I spent evenings and weekends resting, which was sorely lacking before. 

Returning to this theme of vision and purpose, I think the biggest benefit from this sabbatical is that I do feel energized again about my work. If I had done nothing else, the sabbatical would have been worth it to have accomplished only this. I have a much clearer sense for what I want to accomplish in the remaining ten months of 2019, and most importantly, I am excited to get going.

Article
February 24, 2019
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by Stephen

Book Review: Ten Characteristics of Quality Indexes

Ten Characteristics of Quality Indexes: Confessions of an Award-Winning Indexer, by Margie Towery (Medford, NJ: Information Today Inc., 2016)

I must confess that while I bought my copy of Margie Towery’s book shortly after it was published, and while I have dipped into it occasionally, I had not actually read it all the way through until now. That was an oversight on my part, and now that I have read the book, I will be returning to it much more frequently.

I was first introduced to Margie Towery at the first indexing conference I attended, in Toronto in 2014. Towery gave an excellent presentation, in which she covered a lot of the same topics that are in this book. That presentation had an immediate impact on how I indexed, and it was actually just after that conference that I wrote the index for Strange Visitors, which later won the Purple Pen Award for new indexers. 

In this book, Towery goes much deeper into the how and why of indexing. Throughout the book, she proves that indexes and indexing are endlessly fascinating. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and her dedication to understanding the text and creating the best index possible is inspiring. I think she has the most thorough pre-index preparation routine that I have heard of, and I readily believe that it shows through in the indexes that she writes.

One of the running themes throughout this book is that of usability and accessibility. How to make the index easy to use for the reader? That, really, underlies the whole purpose of the index, which is to serve the reader as a finding aid. I wonder sometimes how often we simply follow a convention because it is in whatever guideline we are following, and we don’t think about whether it is the right convention for this particular audience. What makes Towery’s book particularly valuable is that she does discuss the why, and how it ties back to the reader. 

I was also glad to see a discussion of the em-dash-modified format. I think I first learned this format from Thérèse Shere on an email list, but it was good to be reminded of how it works and to see so many good examples of its use. The chapter on reflexivity was also thought provoking, especially the discussion on elegant additions that Towery sometimes adds to an index. This gave me a new way to approach the text as I consider what is indexable. I also appreciated her terminology for the different types of entries, particularly supermain headings and regular main headings. Having a framework for sorting through the masses of information in a book, and how that information relates to each other, is very helpful when putting the index together. Towery’s framework definitely helped mine.

Towery was also generous and extensive in her use of examples from her own indexes, which I think really adds to the value of this book, especially in the chapter on metatopics and index structure. I know I often learn best from being able to see and do, rather than just reading and hearing, so I am glad that Towery was willing to be so transparent about her own practices. 

Margie Towery is, unfortunately for authors and publishers, retired from indexing. But her book will be a lasting legacy and will be of benefit to indexers for a long time to come. It may not be the best starting point for those who are just starting to learn about indexing, as the discussions are more advanced. But for anyone wanting to improve their indexing skills, I highly recommend it. Do buy a copy if you haven’t already.

Article
February 16, 2019
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by Stephen

The Lazy Person’s Guide to Business Development

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

The title for this post is, admittedly, tongue in cheek. I am not suggesting that those of us with our own businesses are lazy. It does point towards the reality, though, that it can be so hard to make time, or even know where to start looking, when it comes to business development. 

I think we know that we should be doing something beyond the day-to-day busyness of keeping our business moving along. We know that professional development keeps us sharp, that the market we are currently working in may change in the coming years, or that there are aspects of our business which could become more efficient. But none of these are, at least right now, immediate concerns. We will get to them someday, right?

I struggle with finding time too. My recent sabbatical, which I am almost finished with, is a more extreme attempt to make time for business development and growth. It is not the only way, though. 

Another approach, which I have been doing for a few years now (and which is where I first got the idea for a sabbatical) is a more passive approach. I have made it a habit to regularly listen to podcasts related to business and writing, and to read books on business and personal development. I try to read one book a month in this area. Occasionally I also attend webinars that come to my attention.

I describe this approach as passive because while I do make choices about what I read or listen to—and I do sometimes seek resources on specific topics—for the most part I am just going by whatever seems interesting and by whatever happens to come to my attention. I don’t yet know if there will be something of value that I can apply to my business. Not everything has gems that I can use, but the main point is that I keep reading and I keep listening. 

I think it is important that this has become a habit. I am regularly exposing myself to new ideas, increasing the chances that something useful to turn up. It helps that this also does not usually feel like work. I do enjoy learning, nor is there a deadline I need to meet, though there are times when I need to learn something that I don’t enjoy as much. 

Of course, if I do come across information that I think I can and should apply to my business, then I have to put in the work to do so. I am not saying that change and growth is always easy, but at least identifying the path towards growth is fairly easy. 

To illustrate what I mean, I would like to mention five examples—three books and two podcasts—that I have either read recently or I regularly listen to, which I have found helpful and would recommend. Your list will probably vary based on your interests and needs, but maybe this will give you some ideas for what you can look for.

Lead to Win podcast

Michael Hyatt bills himself as a virtual mentor for leaders. He spent most of his career in publishing, becoming CEO of Thomas Nelson, and now runs his own eponymous company offering various products, mostly focused on leadership and achieving goals. His podcast Lead to Win, co-hosted with his daughter and COO Megan Hyatt Miller, is free. He also has a previous podcast, This is Your Life, which is similar and also quite good.

I don’t find everything discussed in these podcasts to be relevant. Hyatt’s main audience is leaders in companies with actual employees, much bigger and more complex than my freelancing outfit. That said, because Hyatt is working at a higher level of business than I am, the podcast does introduce me to topics I wouldn’t normally have considered before and it does inspire me to think big and push beyond my comfort level, which I think is good for me. 

The Prolific Writer podcast

The Prolific Writer is a podcast that challenges my writing goals. It is hosted by Ryan J. Pelton, often features interviews with other indie authors, and is dedicated to prolific writing. Pretty much all of the authors involved publish multiple books a year. I am still trying to write my first book, so I am not in that league yet, and I am still a bit incredulous at what some of these authors are able to accomplish. The value for me, though, is that it does challenge my beliefs about what is possible, and besides being inspirational I do pick up nuggets here and there about writing, self-publishing, and the writing market. 

Deep Work, by Cal Newport

I mentioned this book in my blog post last week. Deep work is deliberately spending long periods of time concentrating, without distractions, on high value and cognitively demanding tasks. I’ve been aware of deep work for a couple of years, and finally read the book last month. I am convinced that indexing requires deep work in order to be done effectively, and reading this book has helped me to reconfigure my workday to minimize distractions and maximize the amount of focused time I spend indexing. I highly recommend it.

Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Make Time is another book I have read recently and referenced in a blog post. It is also about how to remove distractions and to make time for what is most important. This is more of a how-to book, as it contains over eighty techniques that you can try. What I found most helpful was their experimental approach. The authors acknowledge that different techniques are going to work for different people, and that everyone is unique in their work demands, their goals, and their biorhythms. So they encourage readers to try different techniques, keep a journal of what works and what does not, and to gradually figure out a personalized schedule. I also recommend their book Sprint, which is not easily applicable to someone working solo, but I still enjoyed learning about their approach to problem solving and product development.

Perennial Seller, by Ryan Holiday

I read this book last year, and the ideas it contains continue to stick with me. Holiday discusses how to create and market items that will continue to sell year in and year out. These may not hit the bestseller lists, but that’s okay because their value will continue to grow over time. This really resonates with my own beliefs about producing quality work. The book read like a road map for the direction I knew I wanted to go in but was not sure how. 

What resources do you find helpful for growing your business?

Article
February 8, 2019
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by Stephen

Indexing as Deep Work

Photo by Nathan Ziemanski on Unsplash

Deep work, as defined by Cal Newport in his book of the same title, is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

As I was reading Newport’s book on this topic, it struck me that indexing is ideally suited for deep work. Especially as I work as a full-time indexer, with often a handful of deadlines in a month, I need to spend several hours every day, sitting at my computer, indexing. I need to be able to see, understand, and hold in my mind both the overarching argument or structure of the book (as well as the overarching structure of the index) as well as the smaller details that flesh out that argument and structure. I am creating a document from scratch that to some extent is unique to me, in that other indexers would write their own variations. And the index will, I hope, add value to the book and for readers. It is not something that is easy to replicate. 

Newport identifies shallow work as being the opposite of deep work. This is work that is low value, non-cognitively demanding, and easily done by someone else. The trick, to reach professional goals or to simply stay on top of deadlines, is to focus on performing deep work—what does drive value—and to minimize or eliminate shallow work. 

I think this distinction between deep and shallow work also applies to indexing, and is highlighted by the contract nature of freelancing. Being a freelancer gives me a lot of freedom in how I use my time—which can be used poorly to read the news or watch Youtube videos. It also means that I need to be aware of and responsive to my email inbox, both for new project offers and to be responsive to existing clients. I would say this is all shallow work, because while I do need to communicate with clients and have a method for accepting new projects, I don’t get paid for checking email. While I do need some breaks throughout the day when I index, news and Youtube can serve as distractions and prove to be less effective as breaks if they are taking me away from indexing. While shallow work is not necessary bad, if we do not prioritize deep work and find ways to keep shallow work at bay during those times, then deep work is unlikely to happen.

So how to prioritize deep work?

Newport’s book has challenged me to rethink how I work. In particular, what are my distractions and how do I handle them? Distractions, even ones that seem fairly innocuous, pull you out of a state of concentration and it can take several minutes to return to the task at hand. This happening once isn’t too bad, but if it is repeated throughout the day those minutes can add up. In my experience, distractions also build upon each other. If I follow that sudden urge to check a fact on Wikipedia, I am likely to have subsequent sudden urges that will be harder to resist. I find distractions can also cause a lot of stress and anxiety, because while a part of me is enjoying the distraction, another part is aware that I am falling behind on the task I should be focused on, which creates a vicious cycle. The more anxious I become the more I seek distractions to sooth the anxiety.

As I have come to realize, the costs to the quality of the indexes I write, how quickly I can index, and the stress I inflict on myself through distractions are too high. At least, I do not want to pay them anymore. I know I can’t eliminate every single distraction, but I can do a lot to eliminate most of them, at least the ones that are self-inflicted. 

So far, I’ve come up with a few strategies to better facilitate deep work. Here are three of them:

  • I use the Freedom app to block myself from most news sites and blogs that I typically frequent. The only day I allow myself to browse these sites are Sundays. I have a different block for social media. This does not work perfectly as there are, of course, other news sites and blogs that I have not yet discovered (and which I subsequently have to block), but overall I do feel much more focused and less anxious. And to be honest, I find I don’t really miss the news. I still get a general sense of what is happening in the world from talking to other people and hearing snippets on the radio, and I have enough interesting things to focus on among my own work.
  • I have stopped checking email in the mornings, and I try to only check email twice in the afternoon. I have been surprised at the results. I have come to value my distraction-free mornings, which is when I can create my best and most important work. So far clients have not noticed or commented on slower replies.
  • I take a long break in the middle of the day. I go to the local YMCA, and depending on the day I either join a circuit training class or I swim. I also eat lunch. All of this takes about an hour and a half. What makes this work is that if I get out of bed on time, I have three hours of deep work in the morning, and then another three and a half hours of deep work in the afternoon. The exercise gives me a chance to rest my brain and recharge for the afternoon session.

These new habits do, I realize, introduce some inconveniences for myself and others. I am not likely to reply immediately to an email. There have been times my wife has forwarded me an interesting news article which I cannot read because of the internet blocks I have in place. Last Sunday, I was surprised to learn that the Super Bowl was happening, and realized I had completely missed the buildup. 

I think the trade-offs are worth it, though. If my clients are hiring me to index, and if indexing requires long periods of concentration, and if I want to produce quality indexes while also preserving time for rest in the evenings and on weekends, then I need to structure my workday and put safeguards in place to make sure that indexing happens in the scheduled hours. I wish I could say that I did not need these safeguards, but I have come to realize that I do. 

The questions are fairly simple: What are my priorities? How do I create lasting value for myself and for others? What do I need to do to make sure these happen?

Article
January 8, 2019
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by Stephen

Making Friends with My Calendar

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Happy New Year! 

I hope your holiday festivities were heart-warming and restorative. My wife and I started ours with our car dying the night before we planned to hit the road, though the holidays did get better from there and we are thankful for a few days with family. 

I don’t usually make New Year resolutions. I think that is largely due to a fear of failure, and of not knowing how to actually implement these goals and aspirations. Change is hard. But I have been thinking recently: if there is one thing I could change this year that would have a significant impact on my life, what would that be? I have decided that that one thing is to make friends with my calendar.

What do I mean by that? Why do I often feel like my calendar is my enemy, or at least a puzzle that is impossible to decipher? There are a number of reasons. Especially as my business has grown in the last few years, I have often felt like my schedule controls me. I feel like I need to work on evenings and weekends in order to meet deadlines, which means making trade-offs with other activities that are also meaningful. I realize this may not be so much a scheduling problem so much as an I’m-accepting-too-much-work kind of problem, but either way it boils down to feeling out of control and overwhelmed.

The problem goes deeper, however, as I have struggled with setting schedules for myself since university. This seems counterintuitive, as I actually thrive on routine. And therein lies the problem, I think. My tendency, when I devise a schedule for myself, is to stick to it as rigidly as possible. Interruptions or other unplanned changes cause me to panic and get disoriented, and eventually I abandon the schedule for a more reactive, and stressful, mode of being. I seem to be in a bind where not having a schedule is not serving me well, yet my typical approach to scheduling and calendars is also not serving me well. I need to find a better way. 

So how do I become friends with my calendar? I mentioned this resolution to my wife, and she astutely pointed out that it is quite an abstract goal. 

I agree with her, and I am okay with that. I am realizing that my relationship to my calendar and schedule is multi-faceted. There is coming to terms with my years of fears, anxieties, and frustrations with schedules. There is learning how to productively handle changes within a schedule. There is finding a scheduling framework that seems to work for me. There is understanding my own biorhythms so that I am working with myself, rather than trying to cram myself into an artificial construct. All of this will take time to figure out and understand.

One book I have read recently is Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. What I appreciate so much about their book, compared to some others I have read about calendars and schedules, is their acknowledgement that everyone is different. They offer eighty-seven tactics to try, but fundamentally their approach is to experiment and be reflective about what works and what doesn’t. I found it incredibly freeing to realize that I don’t need to have the perfect schedule right away, but I can take time to develop it, and that setbacks along the way are part of the process. Indeed, as I age and other life events happen, my schedule will probably continue to evolve. 

The book also discusses a scheduling technique from Cal Newport, who wrote the book Deep Work. In this technique, you write a new schedule for yourself every day, and leave room to revise the schedule as needed. This provides a mechanism—which I have been sorely missing—to thoughtfully acknowledge that change can and will happen, and to recognize that the remaining time can still be reallocated and used productively. I’ve been trying this for a week now, and it has been a helpful tool for reflection. I have handled interruptions better, and on the flip side, it has also helped me stick to my schedule when I’ve been tempted to change for no good reason. 

Another new initiative I’ve been using for about six weeks now is to put up white board wall stickers in my work space. This has been a fantastic change for me. I think I am still learning just how tactile and visually-oriented I am, as I am enjoying both seeing my work on the wall and the physical labour of writing, crossing out, and erasing. Borrowing the concept of sprints and burndown charts from a book I indexed, I list all of my current projects for a two-week period so I have the constant visual reminder of what I need to accomplish. I also graph my progress each day, so I can see where I am with each project. The whiteboard is also a great space to brainstorm, to write notes, and to make lists. I use it every day.

I already have some ideas for what else I want to try this year to become more comfortable with my calendar. I am happy with some of the results so far, and I am sure more ideas will come up as I experiment and reflect. I am hopeful that 2019 will be the year I finally get a handle on my schedule. I wish you all the best in your endeavours this year too.

What are some of the ways or resources you use to keep your calendar in order?

Article
December 9, 2018
1 comment
by Stephen

Book Review: Indexing Children’s Books

I recently indexed a book for children, which is a departure from my usual work. Making the project even more unique, the book was adapted from the original adult version, which I indexed a couple of years ago. I believe the book sold quite well, and hopefully this children’s version does too. It is a book about trees.

I haven’t indexed for children before, but I knew enough, from what other indexers have said, to know that some of the conventions and best practices are different. Learning to use an index is an acquired skill, which children may not have yet. Fortunately, I have on my bookshelf a slim booklet, Indexing Children’s Books, by K.G.B Bakewell and Paula L. Williams. It was published in the UK by the Society of Indexers in 2000, and is still available for purchase on the SI website. I bought the book a few years ago, when I first started to index, but I don’t think I’ve read it until now. It has proven to be an excellent resource, though. I am glad I had it handy.

The book, only 66 pages, is mostly based on a study that the authors conducted in 1997 with indexers, librarians, parents, publishers, and teachers. An additional two studies were conducted with students, ranging from what we would say in North America is elementary to high school. The book discusses both the findings of these studies—how indexes are actually commissioned and made and how children actually use the indexes—as well as how indexes should be made for children. It was quite interesting to see some of the discrepancies between what is done and what should be done, and examples of both poor and good indexing practices.

The core message is that indexes need to be easy to use. Arguably, this should be true for all indexes, including for adults, but especially for children, who may not understand how to use an index or who may be very slow in their use, being slow with spelling or alphabetization, for example. The child should be able to use the index without getting discouraged and giving up. 

One key recommendation is to use language that the children would use, which would often be simpler terms, as well as terms that may not be obvious for an adult. In a way, this is an impossible task, because how can you anticipate all of the possible search terms a user might think of? In one example given in the book, children were asked to suggest alternative keywords for the word “ice.” Terms the children suggested included water, cold, winter, icy, frost, hard, and ice cream. From an adult perspective, some of these are clearly not synonymous with ice, nor are they all good index terms as some are descriptive (terms are usually nouns), and it is unlikely there would be space in the index anyway for all these alternative terms. Still, it is a good reminder that children often approach keywords differently from adults. The indexer should consider using a variety of terms to anticipate the different ways that children might search. Multiple entry points are a must. It can also be helpful to include both general and specific terms. A reader might look under “dogs” to find information about golden retrievers, for example, and might give up if they can’t find relevant information, so double-posting is important.

Other recommendations I thought helpful included limiting the use of subheadings and cross-references (potentially confusing), as well as the use of long strings of locators (too discouraging). Passing mentions should be avoided as being discouraging and a waste of time (which is good practice anyway). Another recommendation I found really interesting was to include an introductory note explaining how to use the index. In a addition to the index as a finding aid, this turns the index into a teaching tool as well. The book also recommended a larger font size for ease of use, and had other suggestions for an inviting and readable layout. This makes the good point that an index is not simply a collection of words and numbers, or terms and locators, that direct people to information. Good design is also important for a successful index that people will want to use.

Beyond the recommendations for writing indexes and the discussions on how children actually use indexes, there were a few sections I found less useful. Parts of the book were clearly aimed at publishers, to encourage them to incorporate best practices into how they commission indexes. That is important, of course, though I am not the target audience for that. There was also a chapter discussing the National Curriculum in England and Wales, and how it relates to indexes. As someone from Canada, this was not relevant to me at all, and I wonder how up to date it is, as the book is almost twenty years old. Still, these are minor quibbles, and the book is an excellent, clearly written resource. I highly recommend it if you want to index for children. I think it’s insights definitely improved the index that I just wrote.

Article
October 28, 2018
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by Stephen

Freelance Anniversary Reflections

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This is my sixth anniversary as a freelance indexer! It was the end of October, 2012, that I left my job at Harbour Publishing and moved back to Vancouver with the intention to work for myself. That first year I received only a few projects, which I have to admit I used as an opportunity to travel. Since I have started, though, I have worked on (or will, once I finish what is currently on my desktop) 224 projects. Work certainly picked up, especially starting my third year. I don’t have an exact count of books indexed, but including books from when I worked in-house, I think I am somewhere in the range of 210-230 indexes written. Someday it would be really neat to be in a room with all of the books I have worked on. For the most part I work on the computer with digital files, so to see the actual physical product all around me would be amazing.  

I’ve been doing some reflection on my business. When I started, part of the motivation was to see if I could start a viable business. I think I can now say, with the support of all of the publishers, editors, and authors who have entrusted their books to me, that I have. I am thankful for the relationships that I have built with clients and colleagues. It is a great little community that I had no idea existed when I started. 

Recently, I’ve been asking myself, “What’s next?” I don’t see this as a negative question, and for the time being I plan to continue in this work. I think every business changes over time, either in response to the market or due to changes in the people working in the business. I know I have definitely changed in the last few years. Some of my reasons for freelancing have either been fulfilled or are no longer applicable, which I think is worth reflecting on. I have also been feeling like the pace I have been working at over the last few months is unsustainable. Being a one-person business, I am not doing myself, or my clients, a favour if I burn out. 

I have decided to take January and maybe February (I’ll see how I feel when I get there) off as a sabbatical. I am a bit nervous as I have never done this before. This is not intended to be a holiday, and for the most part I will stay in Edmonton. I am still working on the details, but I hope to use the time for a mixture of rest; reflection and strategizing for the next few years, both in business and in life (which are very much intertwined, especially as a freelancer); and to get caught up on some projects and tasks I’ve been neglecting. I hope to emerge with a renewed sense of purpose and a more sustainable approach to work and life. I see the sabbatical as an opportunity to grow.

I am sure that I will have more to write later on the sabbatical, as I continue to prepare and then once I’ve completed it. For now, I am looking forward to it. It does feel like the right time. When indexing, it is easy to get caught up in the small details of each project and to not see the big picture of my business and life. I look forward to taking a step back and getting a sense for what the next six years might look like.

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September 22, 2018
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by Stephen

Indexing Fiction: The Lord of the Rings

Happy Hobbit Day!

September 22 is apparently the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. I wonder how old they would be.

Today is also a good excuse to examine the index for the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy. I was quite surprised to notice, a couple of years ago, that my omnibus edition has an index. Thanks to a comment from a colleague, I have learned that the box set also comes with an index, or at least some of the box sets do. 

To back up a moment, and briefly recap, last month I reviewed an online index for The Wheel of Time series. The indexing issues I raised for fiction included spoilers, the scope of the index, locators, and differentiation, for example if the reader has forgotten which is a person, place, or thing. I will not repeat my full discussion of these issues in this blog post, but I will be examining this index with those issues in mind. So, on to the LOTR’s index.

I am curious to know when this index was originally written. My omnibus edition is from 1995, though the copyright page states that the three volumes were first published together in 1968. Does the index extend that far back? I was able to find a copy of the index in a box set on Amazon, using their Look Inside feature. That version is from a mass market paperback edition from Del Ray, apparently from 1986. I do not know if that index is the one reproduced in other box sets as well. In any case, the two indexes are extremely similar. The box set edition appears to have been shortened, which I think makes it less comprehensive and useful, but otherwise I am willing to believe that it is simply a shortened version of the original. In this review, I will mostly be commenting on the longer version found in the omnibus edition.

The index itself is actually a set of four indexes. There is an index for songs and verses; persons, beasts, and monsters; places; and things. There is a fifth section in the box set, with the title of “Supplement: Persons, Places and Things appearing only in Songs and Poems,” only a page long. I am not sure why this fifth index is included, as it is very specific. What audience or need is it seeking to meet? Otherwise, I think splitting the index is a helpful decision on the part of the indexer. It directly addresses the issue of differentiation, and of informing readers what kind of entry they are looking at. Splitting the index also means that each section is not too long, which I think also makes the index easier to search. 

Splitting the index also speaks to the scope of the index, which is what does the index cover. Related to scope is also the use, or not, of subheadings, which also leads to the issue of spoilers. Can we get a sense of the story from the index entries? In this index, the focus of the index is on the tangible. As far as I can tell, there are no conceptual entries, nor do the entries give a sense of plot. There are a few subheadings, but they are mostly of alternative names or terms, such as “the Grey” or “Stormcrow” for Gandalf. I am glad that these alternative terms are included so that the reader can find all of the relevant entries (and I noticed that several of them were removed in the box set edition), but these don’t tell us much about the character, place, or thing. 

Also on scope—and an aspect of this index that I find frustrating—is that the index does not attempt to be comprehensive. The places index, in particular, has a headnote explaining that in most cases only the first mention is indexed, except for where the indexer thought there were other significant mentions. In the box set edition, the headnote actually admits, “This [index] is rather more arbitrary than the last.” The headnote for the persons, beasts, and monsters index simply tells us that “references are selective” (though this headnote is missing from the box set). Still, there are far more locators in the persons index than for places, giving me some confidence that I will at least find all of the major scenes or chapters for a character. I do not know why the same was not done for places. For the things index, there is no headnote, and relatively few locators. This is also the section that appears to have been shortened the most between the two editions. The songs and verses index is short, split between first lines and titles, and seems comprehensive. Overall, it seems like each section was given different treatment, without a lot of explanation to the reader as to why. This makes me doubt the usefulness and reliability of the index. Can I trust that I am being directed to all of the relevant entries? Part of the indexing process is determining what is relevant for the reader, especially if there is a space constraint, so I do not want to fault the indexer for making decisions that we all have to make. In the absence of more information, though, the discrepancies do seem arbitrary, which is not the impression that an index should give.

The locators are also worth commenting on. With no subheadings to indicate plot, there are long strings of undifferentiated locators. These are usually not ideal, but given that this index is trying to avoid spoilers and is only trying to direct readers to the relevant pages, I think the undifferentiated locators are understandable.

 One aspect I found interesting were the extremely long page ranges for main characters. Locators for Frodo, for example, included 21-145 passim, 148-86 passim, 190-209 passim. The term passim, not commonly used, is meant to indicate that the subject is discussed throughout the range, but not necessarily on every page or in a continuous discussion. I think the use here is unnecessary as the reader will probably figure that out from the ranges. Still, these ranges are an interesting solution for how to index main characters who are the focus of the book. The ranges allow those entries to be relatively short, compared to how much of the book the locators cover. 

The locators also, of course, have to be changed for the different editions. For the box set, the index seems to only appear in the third book, The Return of the King, and locators include the volume number, so readers know which book in the trilogy to refer back to. I see value in having the (mostly) same index across all editions, so readers will find the same kinds of information regardless of the edition they are using. It must be a tedious task, though, for whoever given the job of adjusting the locators for each new edition. 

All in all, I think that the LOTR index is decent. Its best feature is having separate indexes for the different types of content. The part of me that likes to be organized and thorough wishes that the index was more comprehensive, in both entries and number of references picked up. At the very least, a longer headnote would be helpful to explain the differences between the sections and what we can expect to find. I also wonder how this index would be different if the plot was at least hinted at, but I respect the decision to not include spoilers. For the reader, I think this index is certainly a vast improvement over having no index, and I am grateful for whoever had the foresight to create it and to keep it in publication.

 My apologies for irregular blogging over the last couple of months. I have had a lot of work this summer, which is continuing into the fall. More to the point, I’ve been away for about a week for each of the last two months, and I have another trip planned starting next week. I don’t usually stagger my holidays like this, and while I have enjoyed the people and places my wife and I have visited, I have also found it difficult to maintain routines in this pattern of intense periods of work interspersed by travel. I look forward to returning to a more settled schedule, including more blogging, when I return in October. 

Article
August 26, 2018
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by Stephen

Indexing Institutional Histories: A Case Study

This last week I finished the index for a large institutional history, 550 pages, including endnotes. It was one of the more challenging books I have indexed. I will not yet reveal the name of the institution, or the title or author, as the book is not yet published, but I am still interested in exploring what made this project unique while it is fresh in my mind. You see, while the institution described is currently a single entity, the book actually discussed three institutions. Let’s call them the museum, the archives, and the library.

The first set of intertwined institutions are the museum and archives. About fifteen years ago they were formally amalgamated, and so they are, now, a single entity while retaining their distinctive spheres. For most of their history, though, going back 100+ years, they were separate institutions, yet often shared the same building. So in a sense this book is really a story of parallel, yet conjoined, histories. Part of my job, as the indexer, was to reflect both histories in the index, and to make it clear when each was being discussed.

The second set of intertwined institutions are the library and the archives. The library was actually established first, before the archives, and part of its mandate was to collect archival records. A few years later the archives were created as a separate entity, and yet for decades not only did the two share a building (with the museum), but they also shared a single administration. The head archivist was concurrently the head librarian. This mixing of roles continued until separate administrators were finally appointed, and until the archives moved out, with the museum, into a new building. At that point the library drops out of this particular story. Yet the library still needed to be addressed in the index. Its presence added yet another level of complexity, made even more so as it was often not clearly differentiated from the archives. The text usually treated both as a single entity, with a focus on archival work, probably because the same staff were involved in both. Because of that, while I had separate main entries for each, for when the difference was clear, I also tended to assume, when the difference was not clear, that the archival side was being discussed.

A temptation for this kind of book is to essentially write two, possibly three, separate indexes, one for each institution. In practice, because separate indexes are not very practical, this would probably look like massive entries for each within a single index, in which the whole history of each institution is clearly delineated. I don’t think that this approach works either. Overly large entries, with long lists of subheadings, or even multiple levels of subheadings, are often difficult to read. This also relates to the concept of the metatopic—the overarching topic of the book to which everything in the book relates. While I take the view that the metatopic should be present in the index as a starting point for the reader—in this case, the metatopics would be the museum and archives—I also agree that the information which form the metatopic should be broken down into their different components and scattered throughout the index to give the reader smaller chunks of information to digest. 

That still leaves the question, though, of how to differentiate between information that is related to the museum and information that is related to the archives and library. Ideally, if the reader is only interested in one institution or the other, the reader should know which they are getting. My overall strategy was to be clear in the language I used. I also dealt with this on a case-by-case basis, as I was afraid that if I was too rigid following a particular strategy or formula, I would end up with too much repetition between the entries, and an index that was longer than necessary. To give a few examples…

There were a number of areas in which both the museum and the archives had similar programs or issues. Both, for example, published books, reports, and magazines or journals. In order to differentiate, I decided to have parallel entries of,

publishing program, archives 

publishing program, museum

Other topics, I felt, did not make sense to differentiate, either because the same issues applied to both, or because it was primarily only one institution that dealt with that issue. An example would be the buildings these institutions occupied, which in most instances were shared. Another instance was finances, a lot of which were about government budget cuts which affected both equally. I thought that I would have a lot of duplication if I had separate entries, which seemed to me to add limited value. 

In these cases, I also sometimes use subheadings to highlight one or both institutions where it made sense to do so. This would usually be a situation in which the entry was primarily about one institution, but for which there were a couple of locators for the other as well. For example, exhibitions and displays was almost entirely about the museum, as I think most people would expect. Yet the archives had a small gallery that was also referenced a couple of times, so “in archives” became a subheading. For the entry for collections, which was about collections in general with numerous cross-references to specific collections, most of the subheadings were applicable to both institutions, but I also had the following two subheadings for the one instance I thought differentiation made sense:

collection policy for archives

collection policy for museum

Another issue was how to differentiate the staff, particularly the administrators who tended to have the most lengthy entries. I decided that I would not try to differentiate staff who did not have enough entries to merit subheadings, but for staff with subheadings, I tried to insert the term museum or archives somewhere near the top of the entry. This usually meant a subheading along the lines of,

appointment and departure from archives and library

This usually sorted to be the first or second subheading in the entry, which I hope will help orient readers to where this person worked, and what kind of information they can expect from this entry. I think this is preferable to giving no clue, and leaving the reader to possibly waste time on the wrong person.

All told, this was quite a dense text, though well-written. I did find the book interesting, especially as I have done some research myself at this particular archive. Now that I understand its history and collection better, I kind of want to return, though I don’t know what I would research. The index was also quite the challenge. I hope that the decisions I made make sense, especially to the readers who will be using it.