What to index

Apart from the number of pages available, there is another important factor determining the length of an index: just what is to be indexed. This is not an issue considered in advance by most authors, I suspect, but your choices here will add to readers’ perceptions about the index and your book.

Does it look as if the indexing job has been thoroughly done – but not overblown – or is this a skimpy (even sloppy) affair? Although a threadbare index useless to its purpose will immediately signify that the rest of your book is equally inadequate, more is not necessarily better. There are limits.

So what material should be indexed in your book?

Obviously, your body text must be indexed, but what about notes that comment on the text? Citations and bibliography are usually not indexed; will you follow that practice? Some publishers think it unnecessary to index a glossary (indeed, sometimes an index becomes a kind of glossary), but consider it essential to index any illustrations and captions. What does your publisher say?

With luck, your publisher will have guidelines on all of these matters but otherwise simply use your common sense.

As you can see, decisions need to be made here but they are not life and death issues, nothing even to lose sleep over. Indeed, although what you chose to index can be significant, the ultimate quality of your index depends on other factors, not least the intellectual conceptualization of the index (or mind map, discussed here) and its ‘visualization’ in the index structure, the subject of my next post.

(Post #8 of the Indexing section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Unrealized expectations

You hoped that your editor would agree to the use of colour inside your book. Nah! Too expensive. (We’ve talked about this already.) And as for the cover, none of your ideas were even solicited let alone listened to (this also discussed here). But some of the other things you are expecting with your book – or just assume will be implemented (their merits are so obvious) – may not happen either.

Oh dear, time for a few disappointments (and a dash of incredulity).

Footnotes or endnotes?

Some authors hate endnotes with a passion while others naively expect to see the method they used in their manuscript replicated in the typeset book. Expect the worst. More than likely, your footnotes will be converted to endnotes and placed at the end of each chapter.

From a publisher’s viewpoint, this is quite reasonable. Technically, with modern DTP software, footnotes are relatively easy to work with (as easy as they are with a word processor like MS Word). That doesn’t mean that publishers are willing to retain an author’s footnotes, however.

Perhaps the main reason is conservatism but in many cases the problem is a question of avoiding layout hassles. This is especially the case when not only are there a whole lot of notes but also there are tables and illustrations to be placed in the text. Juggling the placement of text, notes, tables and illustrations while preserving an aesthetic balance can be a real headache, as can be seen in this example.

As such, it may be that you get little say in whether your book is typeset with footnotes or endnotes. Mind you, if you are a typical author, perhaps you haven’t given your publisher any idea of your wishes (let alone any incentive to take your wishes into consideration) until it is too late. As I’ve pointed out earlier, authors often show great interest in how their cover looks like but they rarely seem to concern themselves with the page design.

Other layout expectations

It is likely that other expectations you may have about the layout are less important to you. Some of the more common features found in an author’s ms that often are not retained by typesetters are:

• Bold text (many typesetters regard bold as a ‘shouting’ style and prefer the use of italics, seeing this as a more subtle and elegant type style).
• Capitals (another ‘shouting’ style, best replaced by text in title case, small caps or italics).
• Headings (changing the alignment and replacing attributes like bold and/or capitals with small caps, italics, etc.).
• Font (this may be predetermined in a house style for the press or this series, the need to save space may mandate use of a more compact font like Minion, or perhaps it’s Monday and the typesetter feels like using Garamond; certainly, it’s unlikely that the default font in Word – Times New Roman – will be at the first that the typesetter chooses).
• Type size (determined in part by the font selected and in part by whether the typesetter needs to save space or pad out the text a bit).
• Placement of special text (as discussed earlier, even in the age of Open Type, many publishers are averse to the use of non-Latin script, diacritics, etc.; such text may end up segregated in a separately typeset glossary, though if so this should have been discussed with your before now).
• Placement of tables and illustrations (even if, as I recommended here,  you have indicated that this table should go here and that illustration there, the complexity of the layout – or typesetter laziness – may mean something different happens).

Disconcerted in other ways

The layout is not the only source of nasty surprises for authors. Even though authors generally get to see what is written when their book is first announced, it is amazing how often they act surprised when seeing the first proofs after the typesetting – specifically after looking at the title page and copyright page of their book. Common causes of authors expressing shock and horror are the:

• Format/edition (do not assume there will be a paperback edition of your book; some publishers are especially unlikely to publish in paperback).
• Pricing (if your publisher is aiming to sell to the academic library market only, then the price may be horrendous; forget about all your colleagues buying your book).
• Subject (your book may be wrongly classified – labelled as politics instead of anthropology – but, just as bad, the classification may be too simplistic. This is no surprise; given the way bookshops function, your book may only be displayed in the China section – if at all – even though it offers a major breakthrough in sociological theory as well and thus deserves to be shelved under Sociology as well).
• Series (unless you have approached the press proposing that your study be published in a specific series, it may be simply plonked in that series which your editor thinks is most appropriate; in fact, it may not be so).
• Publisher (yes, some authors even get this wrong, thinking for instance that – because their book will be distributed in North America by Such-and-such University Press – the imprint of that press will appear on their title page; not so).

Of necessity, each of the points above deserve far greater explanation than there was room for here. I’ll do this in several posts another day. Meantime, let’s explore perhaps the greatest problem that you will face with your book: letting go, handing over your ‘baby’ to strangers.

(Post #19 of the Design & Typesetting section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Placement of non-text elements

Imagine this. A key passage in your book surveys the tourist icons of Paris. As your readers learn about the gargoyles of Notre Dame, on the opposite page they see the iron lacework of the Eiffel Tower. Turn the page and the story of the tower is told – illustrated with a picture of buses and tourists outside the Louvre.

These things happen. They shouldn’t.

Double vision

A key difference between modern typesetting programs and a word processor like Word is that the typesetter works with double-page spreads, the same view that readers have when moving through a physical book. (The single-page perspective of e-books is one of their major disadvantages, by the way, but this is rarely mentioned.) This double-page ‘workbench’ makes it easier for the typesetter to place tables, illustrations and other figures to their best advantage.

(Easier but not always easy. The layout of page after page of straight text is quite easy. But having to juggle the placement of text, footnotes, tables and illustrations all within a few pages – and ensure that the result is both aesthetically pleasing and meaningful – is decidedly not simple. This is one of the reasons why some publishers insist on endnotes – but more about that later this week.)

Insertion points need to be clear

Unfortunately, typesetters aren’t mind-readers. While some diligently read the text so they can lay it out in the best possible way (for this reason, often it is the typesetter who notices errors and omissions not discovered at editing), others do not have the time for such a hands-on approach. What you should count on, then, is that your typesetter won’t have the time to decipher from your text where precisely this table should go or where that illustration.

For this reason, you would be smart to indicate in the text where every non-text element should go. Something like ‘INSERT FIGURE 3.2 ABOUT HERE’ may not be pretty but it is necessary. (Indeed, your failure to specify an approximate insertion point may cause the typesetter to completely overlook that illustration and fail to place it.)

Colour sections

Placement of colour illustrations (as discussed in my previous post) is slightly more tricky. There is no problem if the book is completely in colour (simply indicate an insertion point as above). But if your colour illustrations are to be gathered into a colour section, then there is an issue. The point is that this colour section is a section; here, we are not talking about a scattering of colour illustrations placed wherever they are referred to. No, a colour section is a 16-page, full-colour signature that must be inserted between two monochrome signatures. Precisely where this will be inserted cannot easily be predicted in advance. All that may be possible is to indicate an insertion point as close as possible to this or that passage of text.

Certainly, however, you should not leave placement of any colour section to the whims of your typesetter. Be proactive, discuss things with your production editor and ensure that placement of this colour section is specified in the page design brief (discussed in greater detail here, while my argument for author activism is here).

One last thought

What is discussed in this post is placement of non-text elements, not if they are actually necessary. Pictures may say more than a thousand words but they also interrupt the narrative, as do tables, charts and graphs. In each case, ask yourself whether this interruption to the flow of text is necessary, appropriate and desirable.

(Post #16 of the Design & Typesetting section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)