As you may have noticed, two weeks ago, on May 6, I started live-tweeting my indexing process, as I indexed the trade book Almost Human: The Story of Julius, the Chimpanzee Caught between Two Worlds. Those tweets are now compiled, with some additional commentary, which you can find here. I also want to take a moment to reflect on the experience.
First of all, I am glad that I did it. I have had the idea for at least a few months, wondering what live-tweeting an index would be like. Now I know, and it feels good to put the idea in action and see it to its conclusion.
I am also very thankful for everyone who took the time to follow along, and to comment, ask questions, retweet, and like specific tweets. It was encouraging to know that I was not tweeting into a void. The indexing community on Twitter is supportive and positive, so I am glad to have you all with me. I hope the experience was interesting for you as well.
As for my goal of raising the profile of indexing, even if just in a small way, and of reaching authors, editors, and publishers—I don’t really know how that went. As I learned, Twitter provides limited data. I was able to see how many impressions each tweet received, and of total impressions over the course of a day, but an impression simply means, if I understand it correctly, that someone saw the tweet. It could have been someone scrolling through their Twitter feed without really reading the tweet, or it could have been someone who was actually interested and following along. So while the live-tweets apparently got several thousand impressions over the course of the week, I don’t know how engaged those impressions where. Also, unless someone took the time to comment, retweet, or like, I don’t know who those impressions are from. So, maybe I met my goal? I don’t really know. All I can really go on is the feedback I receive from people who noticed and took the time to say something.
As for the indexing itself, I would make a couple of changes if I did this again. I found that I had less to tweet about as the index progressed, so I would put more effort into pre-planning some topics and making sure tweets were spaced out. I would leave room for spontaneous tweets as well, of course, but I think having a rough plan or outline ahead of time would have been helpful. I would also try to ensure that I was only working on that one project, so that I could finish the index in 3-4 days. I think having the indexing spread over seven days, due to a second project I also needed to finished, resulted in some live-tweeting fatigue. It is too bad how the scheduling worked, though that is also an insight into how I work, with overlapping projects when deadlines demand.
I am not sure if I will do this again. As I mentioned above, I think it is a fun idea, but it is hard to tell how effective it is for reaching people. To switch things up, I wonder how it would be to live-tweet with someone else, so that there is more of a conversation throughout. That might be interesting to try. At the very least, I am glad that I tried something new and pushed myself out of my comfort zone. And thank you again to everyone who followed along.
If you are interested in reading the book, Almost Human, by Alfred Fidjestøl, it is forthcoming later this year by Greystone Books. You can learn more about it here. Many thanks again to Greystone for giving their permission for this live-tweet. They are a fantastic publisher and a pleasure to work with.