Michelle Guiliano - Line by Line Indexing

Your Nonfiction Book + Quality Index = Searchable & Easy-To-Find Content for Readers & Researchers

📚🗝️ Books offer the keys to knowledge, unlocking the doors to a wider world. But unlike the world wide web, most books don’t come with search engines. That’s why nonfiction books need indexes—to help readers (and researchers!) find what they need quickly.

Although my background is in the sciences and medicine (I practiced as a podiatrist for 10 years), I’m more of a generalist. I index graduate-level science and medicine textbooks books. Yet, I’m equally comfortable diving into a trade book on disco or a business book on leadership. When my kids were teenagers, I frequently reminded them that I might not have written the book on adolescent behavior, but I did index it!

Here are my indexing stats:
‣ 10+ years indexing
‣ 100s of indexes
‣ 10,000s of pages indexed
‣ 100,000s of index entries
‣ indexing conference presenter and course creator
‣ podcast host of Freelance Indexer Exchange—currently in its 3rd season
‣ founder and writer at Indexer Index—community indexing hub for authors, editors, indexers, and publishers

How do I create an index? Here’s the short version:
➊ First, I carefully read your book.
➋ While reading your book, I take a deep dive into the ideas and structure of your book, creating the scaffolding of the index that resembles your book’s structure, only in alphabetical order.
➌ Then, I create more index entries of the ideas, people, places, and events in your book, adding connections between them, when necessary, to reflect your book’s content.
➍ Finally, I assemble everything together, editing the index for easy searchability.

Writers, researchers, scientists, content creators, do-it-yourselfers, students, academics, hobbyists, parents and, yes, even teenagers use indexes.

Find out more about my indexing business and my rates here.

Your words—and the ideas in your book—deserve to be found.

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