Article
April 30, 2018
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by Stephen

The Benefits and Practice of Practice

So you have decided to be an indexer. Maybe you have taken a course to learn how to index, and perhaps you have started to build your bridge so that you can transition to full-time freelance indexing. But still, a question remains (well, probably several questions, but we’ll get to the others later). How do you become good at indexing?

I have heard some new indexers talk about the course which they have taken as being a good starting point, but they are still not confident in their indexing abilities. They still have questions about how to construct a index, or about what terms to include, or about when subheadings are necessary and how to phrase the subheadings. This is an astute observation on the part of the new indexer, and I think it reveal the importance of practice.

About ten years ago, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of needing to put in 10,000 hours of practice in order to achieve excellence. That claim is much disputed (more about that, and practice, here), and I do not think that you need to put in 10,000 hours to become an excellent indexer. Practice, though, is still important, especially deliberate, focused practice, in which you are able to be aware of what you are creating, and to find ways to improve. This ties nicely into the idea of life-long learning and professional development. I still try to improve my craft, even though I have been indexing for about seven years now, and have written around 200 indexes. I believe that I can get better.

The good news from this is that you do not need to be an expert to start freelancing. You need to be good enough so that you can do a decent job. You do, after all, want the client to hire you again or to recommend you to others. But practice is, essentially, deliberate doing, and once you have achieved a certain level of competency, you can practice as you work. 

But still, how to practice? Especially if you are at the start of your freelance career and no one has hired you yet. Perhaps you are like the new indexers I have talked to who have completed training, but are not yet confident in their abilities. There still are ways that you can practice. Practicing now, before your first paid job, will solidify your skills, give you confidence for when you do land that first job, and might also give you a portfolio which you can use to market yourself.

Here are a few suggestions for how to practice.

  • Critique published indexes. Examine the indexes that are already on your bookshelf, visit the library, or browse indexes on Amazon using the Look Inside function. What does the index do well? What is done poorly? Is there anything unique about the index? Any rules broken? Why does it work or not work? Try to critique both poorly written indexes and excellent indexes. What differentiates the two? Look at several indexes from within the same subject or genre. What makes the good ones good? This is actually how I learned how to index. I had a short-term work placement with a university press, and one day I was handed an index, the press’ indexing guidelines, and the Chicago Manual of Style chapter on indexing. My job was to figure out if the index was ready for publication, and, if it was not, to fix it. After doing this several times, I was ready to try writing my first index.
  • Find a book or report and index it. This can be a book off of your shelf or a PDF pulled from the internet. It can already have an index or you could be writing its first index ever. The point is that you are writing an index. No one is paying you for it, but you can use the resulting index in your portfolio.
  • Volunteer your indexing services for a friend or local society. I know that as professionals, paid work is what we strive for, and I do not want to advocate doing too much for free. However, if you are trying to build confidence, your skills, and/or a portfolio, and you know of a person or group that could use an indexer, volunteering to write an index might be a win-win situation for one or two projects. Be clear on your reasons for taking on the project, and be clear with the client on the parameters of the project, and this could be a good stepping stone towards your freelance career.
  • Ask for feedback from other indexers. And, see if you can critique other indexers’ works-in-progress. This can be a great way to both gain feedback and see what others do. If you are interested in this, there is an email group, Index Peer Reviewers, for this very purpose.

Practicing can feel like a chore, and it can feel disconnected from what you really want to do, which is to be a professional freelance indexer. But if you keep that goal in mind, and take the time now to practice, either while waiting for that first paid job to arrive or in anticipation of launching your freelance career, I think you will find that you will have greater confidence in your abilities, and be working at a higher level, which will help you find success sooner as a freelancer. So pick an approach and start practicing today.

The Freelance Career Launch Series is a set of posts about how to start your freelance career. The focus will be on indexing, because that is what I do, but the principles are universal. 

Article
April 23, 2018
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by Stephen

Freelance Career Launch Series: Building a Bridge

So you want to be an freelance indexer. The idea of being paid to read is alluring, or you need a more flexible job that will fit around the rest of your life, or you just want to work from home. Whatever your reasons, welcome!

But how, you ask, do I become a freelance indexer? Or a freelance anything? Where does the work actually come from? Is there enough work out there for me, and for everyone else who is also freelancing?

The answer is yes, I do believe that there is enough work out there for all who want to freelance. And yes, initially finding that work will probably be difficult. It will take effort to connect with the people who need your services, and it may take time before those people are ready to hire you. I have heard it said, and found this true for myself, that it takes about three years to build up a business to the point where you are consistently working full-time. Freelancing is not a quick fix for a sudden financial crunch. Successful freelancing is a long-term endeavour.

But still, how do you start? Because we all have to start from somewhere.

In his book The Art of Work, Jeff Goins discusses the concept of building a bridge to achieve your goals. In this way of thinking, you work systematically towards your goal instead of taking a drastic leap. You do not need to do everything at once to achieve your dream. Instead, you are always asking yourself, what can I do next? In freelance terms, this likely means preparing to freelance prior to quitting your previous job. It means that you have certain conditions in place that give you the confidence to freelance, because you have already done some of the work, and what you have done leads naturally to the next phase.

For me, I was confident about quitting my in-house publishing job and starting to freelance because I had learned how to index while working in-house, I already had some guaranteed work from previous employers, and I had some money saved which I could live off of for the first few months. This was my bridge that allowed me to build a freelance business. Was it enough to provide me with full-time work when I first started to freelance? No, I was only working part-time, at best, in my first year as a freelancer. But I had enough to pay the bills, and I had enough to build upon, which was what I needed.

So what can you do to build your bridge? We all start from different places, so your bridge may look different from mine. Here are a few suggestions, though, for where to start. How many of these you need is up to you.

  • Learn how to index. You can take a course, you can teach yourself, or you can learn while working in-house for someone else. But your first freelance job, working under a deadline, is not the best time to learn. 
  • Moonlight. If you have a full-time job, start freelancing part-time on the side. This will give you experience and you can start to build your client base. When you do decide to freelance full-time, you will probably have to expand your client base, but that should be easy compared to starting from scratch.
  • Secure promises for work. Do you have an employer or previous employers who can send you work when you switch to freelancing? Do you know of other potential sources of work? Talk to them now. The best piece of advice I received when I started is to have some work already lined up. This alleviates the financial stress of not knowing how you are going to pay your bills in those first months. It also gives you a portfolio right from the start that you can show to other potential clients.
  • Build a financial cushion. As mentioned in the previous point, stressing out about how to pay your bills is not fun, and is not conducive to the mental and emotional space needed to build your business. Also keep in mind that clients usually pay after the job is completed, so even if you do have work lined up for when you start freelancing, it will probably still be a couple of months before you see that money. If you can, save some money to live on for those first few lean months. 
  • Network. Even if your previous employer can send you work, you will likely need a larger client base than that. Are there local publishers that you can contact and ask to visit their offices or meet for coffee? Are there local editor and author groups that you can join or visit? Are there relevant conferences that you can attend? Can you get to know other indexers? Finding work is about connecting with the right people. Start building those relationships now, so that you are not completely isolated when you start to freelance. 
  • Create a plan. What kind of indexing do you want to do? How much money do you need to make? How do you define full-time? How are you doing to market yourself? Where are you physically going to do the work? You do not have to implement this plan before you start to freelance, and the plan will probably change over time as you gain experience and as circumstances change, but having some amount of plan will help tell you what the next steps are, and will help to give you a sense of momentum.

Starting your own business is never going to be easy. It will always carry some risk. I do believe, however, that it is possible to manage the level of difficulty. If you can think of launching a business as a series of smaller steps, some of which can be done prior to launch, you will be setting yourself up for a greater chance at success, and an easier, less stressful beginning. That is what building your bridge is about.

If you have already launched your freelancing business, what steps did you take to ensure success?

The Freelance Career Launch Series is a set of posts about how to start your freelance career. The focus will be on indexing, because that is what I do, but the principles are universal. 

Article
April 2, 2018
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by Stephen

Readable Invoice Templates

Who wants a snazzy invoice?

I do. I like the idea of reflecting a small part of myself in a document that is otherwise so impersonal. I also like the idea of making business, including invoices, fun. There is a part of me that has always chafed at formality.   

I was therefore pleased to learn, when I first got the invoicing program that I use, Billings, that it came with pre-designed templates. I chose one with a clean design that matched my minimalist tastes. I thought it was both professional and had a certain light quality, with blue and grayscale lettering.

All seemed (mostly) wonderful until a few month ago, when I received an email from a long-time client. Their finance person was having trouble reading my invoices. The font was too small. A PDF of my invoice—as they saw it—was helpfully attached.

I was shocked at what I saw. It looked like my invoice had been printed out, written on, and then either photocopied and/or scanned back into a digital format. The greyscale and blue lettering had not transitioned well, and what remained was fuzzy. Even I could not read portions of the invoice.

No kidding, the font was too small.

To make this worse, I heard something similar from another client a few months earlier. Again, their finance department was having trouble reading my invoice, specifically my address. Though the editor I work with at that publisher is fantastic, I had had payment issues with them for a few years, so I have to admit that I was not the most sympathetic for their finance department. Yes, I want them to get my address correct, but to redesign my whole invoice? Really? I found a workaround by re-writing my address in the comments section, in a large, black font, and that seemed to work for them. When I received this second complaint, it finally hit me–maybe the reason for the payment issues was because they could not read my invoices either.

I felt guilty and embarrassed. How many other clients had been struggling to read my invoices? I assumed that my invoices stayed in their digital format, as a PDF, but clearly that is not always the case. I also should have taken the first complaint much more seriously, and tried to understand why their finance department was having trouble. 

I also needed to redesign my invoice.

Looking through the templates in Billings showed that they all incorporate colour or greyscale, and they all use a small font size. I tried to modify the template I was using, but increasing the font size caused the text to bunch together, which still made for difficult reading. In the end, I modified a different template. This is now strictly black and white, has large font, and has a spread-out design, so the text does not bunch. I also avoided any sort of background design behind the text, so that the text and the background do not blend.

The template is not as snazzy, but so far there have been no complaints, and payment problems with that one client seem to have stopped. Lesson learned that while fun and personalization have their place—I still think—functionality is also important. It is a problem if my clients cannot access the information that I am trying to send them.

What business practices have you had to change based on feedback from clients? How did you deal with them?

Article
August 1, 2016
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by Stephen

Surfing the Schedule, and Those Damn Easy Projects

pexels-photo

It has been a busy year.

I had projects waiting for me when I got home from Christmas holidays, and the work hasn’t stopped since.

It has been pretty tiring at times too. Working evenings and weekends? Check. Working on two indexes at once? Check. Have projects that take longer to finish that anticipated? Check. Have books arrive either earlier or later than scheduled? Check again.

Book publishing is definitely dynamic. Each book has its own production schedule. Each production schedule involves multiple editors, proofreaders, designers, and even, sometimes, an indexer, not to mention the author. Each editor/proofreader/designer/indexer is themselves most likely working on multiple projects at once, or at least has the next project lined up for when the current one is finished. The system is ripe for schedule slippage, for deadlines overlapping, for projects banging into the next, you eyeing the calendar and the clock trying like hell to put this baby to bed so that you can get on to the next project, with its own increasingly looming deadline.

It gets chaotic. With multiple schedules piling up, I feel like I am surfing, trying to stay ahead of the wave, reach the shore in one smooth movement, before heading back out to sea to catch the next wave. What can happen instead, though, is that I lose my balance, the wave knocks me off my board, I get buffeted around in the surf for a while before I can surface and breathe again. At that point either the next wave has already passed me by or it is right on top of me.

So, schedules. They are important.

I have been learning this anew these last seven months, the busiest winter and spring I’ve had so far as a freelancer. But it is important to note, however, that there are two types of schedules at play. The first, which I have already mentioned, is the production schedule that each book is on. This I have very little control over. If the schedule doesn’t suit me, I can ask my client if the schedule can be changed. Sometimes the client is able to accommodate me and sometimes they can’t, at which point either I change my schedule or another freelancer gets the project.

The second schedule, which I do have more control over, is my personal daily/weekly/monthly work schedule. This kind of schedule is important too, if I am going to efficiently and effectively complete the indexing and proofreading projects that I have accepted. It has been this type of schedule that I’ve been learning that I really need to tighten up.

Specifically, here, I want to write about scheduling in what I call the easy books. If you work in publishing, you probably know the type. For me they are usually trade books, sometimes coffee table style, heavily illustrated. The subject matter is often engaging, and written in a fairly light manner. It usually isn’t long, maybe 200-250 pages, and the index won’t be long either.

I really enjoy these books. I enjoy many of the dense, academic books I get to index too, but after a dense book these short, trade books are just so fun and refreshing in comparison. They can be a good pick-me-up after slogging through a heavy 400 page tome.

I figure I can usually index the easy books in 10-15 hours, sometimes less. Surely I can find time for 10-15 hours over the course of a couple of weeks, right?

That is what I thought too until I started to notice a pattern over these last few months. When schedules got really tight, I found that I was focusing on the most difficult indexes first, because those where the deadlines I was most scared of. I wasn’t putting the time I needed into the easy books until the last minute, usually, at which point it was a mad scramble to finish the index. The “fun” indexes weren’t so funny anymore. They became a source of stress, feeling like I had taken on more work than I should have.

Was it really too much work, though, or was it a scheduling problem? A month ago I had another of these easy indexes to complete, and I decided to focus on my schedule. I still had a larger, more complex scholarly book to index as well, which I knew was going to take the bulk of my time and attention. But instead of spending all of my time on the scholarly book, I decided to take the first hour of work every morning and devote it to the easy book. It wasn’t much, an hour. I indexed maybe 20-30 pages in that time. But as I discovered, it was enough.

I chose to index the easy book in the morning so that I wouldn’t be tempted in the late afternoon or evening to push it off because I was tired from the hard book. Because I wasn’t indexing at the last minute I actually got to enjoy the easy book, which was a large part of why I had accepted it in the first place. I still had the whole rest of the day to work on the more difficult book. When it came time to edit the easier index, I still scheduled a full day to do that as I find it easier to edit in one long go than to break it up with another project, but scheduling one day is a whole lot easier than trying to squeeze in multiple days at the last minute. In the end, both the easy index and the more difficult index were finished on time and fairly stress-free. Success!

Is there anything else about my personal work schedule that I can change? Probably. I’ll take another look and perhaps write about this again. I think that work is more enjoyable and productive in a relatively stress-free environment, and schedules are certainly part of that equation.

In the meantime, what scheduling tips do you have for managing tight deadlines and multiple projects? I would love to hear.

Article
May 14, 2016
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by Stephen

Five Things I Learned Last Month from Indexing

pexels-photo-38136You know those days and weeks when it is one project after the other? The content from one book starts to blend into the content of the next? Occasionally my mind will draw a blank when my wife asks me at the end of the day what I’ve learned from my indexing and proofreading work. My mind is so bloated with information that I don’t know where to begin.

That is crunch time in publishing. Just seems to be part of the business.

But I do actually learn from the projects I work on, even if I sometimes need to decompress a bit before I can remember and articulate. I recently thought it would be a fun exercise to write down five things I learned from my last few projects. So, in no particular order, here are five things I have learned from books I’ve indexed and am indexing in the last month or so.

  1. Reading studies is an actual discipline in the social sciences.
  2. Ancient Tamil poetry is amazingly gorgeous, complex, and dark. I feel like I could get lost in the worlds those poems depict.
  3. The grand narrative of the Japanese-American experience is much more rigid than I realized. If your family settled in Hawai’i and California, experienced internment, and tried to be a model minority (at the risk of oversimplifying it), you are part of the Japanese-American narrative. If your personal experience is different, chances are literature on and recognition of your experience is sparse. I wonder how this compares to Japanese-Canadian, or Chinese-American/Canadian, narratives.
  4. Saying the phrase, “death and dying,” in that order, is strange, when you think about it, since dying is the process that occurs before death. Still, I have to think a moment before I can say, “dying and death.” Something about the ordering of the syllables?
  5. Trees communicate! Through smells, electrical signals, and root and fungal networks. Sure, we are doing a pretty good job of disrupting their communication through our managed, lumber-based forestry practices, but if we let them grow old and wild enough, trees communicate! Makes me question again my summers working as a tree planter.

What interesting things have you learned recently from your work?

Article
November 15, 2015
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by Stephen

Wither Pacific Educational Press?

I got an email this summer from an editor at Pacific Educational Press informing me that the press was being shut down this fall. Pacific Educational Press, or PEP, run out of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, was a small press, publishing only a few books each year, but still a client that had been with me since I began freelancing. Thanks to a connection and reference from my former supervisor at Harbour Publishing to a PEP editor, I received my first freelance contract within a month of leaving Harbour.

That first project was tough. It was an updated edition of an anthology on teaching social studies to elementary students.  Chapters had been added, deleted, rearranged, and revised. I was not familiar with the subject matter, and this was my first time facing a revised edition. The editor suggested I take the index of the previous edition and update it.

Now, any indexer who has been around for a while knows that “updating” an index for a text with this many changes is “indexing hell,” as I heard it so delicately described recently. T0 be fair, I don’t think the editor realized what she was asking. I was still naive enough, however, afraid of the topic, and afraid of offending my first ever client, that I agreed to the editor’s proposal.

Sure enough, indexing that book was hell, but I got through it. More importantly, I learned from it. I learned from the previous index I was working from how to approach this sort of text. I gained confidence that I could tackle a project this different. I felt great when the editor contacted me a few months later with another project.

Since that first project three years ago I’ve indexed five more books for PEP.  Two have been high school textbooks, on fashion and nutrition and health. The others have been on dyslexia (which was also neat in that it was typeset to be more accessible to people with dyslexia), a book on teaching Shakespeare to elementary students (I wish my teachers did that when I was a kid), and finally, this spring, a book on Imaginative Ecological Education.

It was a shock to hear this summer that PEP was closing down. I have enjoyed their books. As I’ve built my business it has been encouraging that the editors at PEP have repeatedly asked me to work on their titles. As my first client, I do have a soft spot for them. Reflecting on the news of their closure, I decided that I did want to write some sort of farewell.

Looking again on their website, however, I see that PEP is not quite as gone as I thought. PEP is now an imprint at UBC Press. Will I work again on their titles? I don’t know. I have worked for UBC Press as well, but UBC Press is a much larger press, with a diverse publishing program, and it is impossible to predict what they might ask me to work on.

So perhaps this is still a farewell. Thank you, PEP, for allowing me to work with you these last three years. I wish you all the best in your new home. Hopefully I will cross paths again with your titles.