By Ken Saladin

Most authors may not want to index their own textbooks. Indexing has to be done quickly when paginated proofs become available, yet it comes at a time when we’re very busy proofreading the final pages, writing front matter, and getting the book to press. It also must look, to most, like a tedious chore. It may seem better left to a professional indexer, even if the cost is borne by the author.

Even aside from the cost, there are good reasons to leave it to the pros. Indexing is a complex skill that requires understanding of not just the book’s subject matter, but its audience, the publisher’s practices, and the stylistic mechanics of good versus amateurish and dysfunctional indexes. It’s not something your spouse, Uncle Joe, or graduate student can do, without a technical knowledge of indexing, while you attend to other details. Professional indexers often work with the aid of software that’s costly and takes time to learn, and authors may not have time for that. By the end of a book project, authors often are tired of it. Their fatigue can be reflected in a low-quality index, or one that starts out well but flags halfway through the project.

Fatigued, too close to the subject matter to be objective, too enamored of every precious idea they have put in the text, and unskilled in index practices, authors can be the worst indexers of their own work. But a disciplined author observant of best practices in the art can also be the best indexer. We know the subject matter better than anyone. We navigate our own book and understand the relationships between its ideas better than anyone. We know our students’ vocabulary, comprehension level, and textbook navigation needs better than anyone.

I have gotten some abominable, unpublishable results from professional indexers, both US-based and overseas, and have had to learn professional practices and step in at least five times to produce my own indexes worthy of a place between the covers. I hope to soon relate in another TAA venue (blog and/or 2025 conference) the experiences that drove me to defensive self-indexing; things for other authors to beware of; methods I’ve developed to make the task efficient and feasible in an author’s busiest time; and some basic elements of index composition that measure up to the best industry practices in the art and profession.

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Ken Saladin taught courses ranging from animal behavior to human physiology for 40 years at Georgia College, retiring in 2017 as distinguished professor, emeritus. He became a textbook author with McGraw Hill in 1993 and currently writes three textbooks of anatomy and physiology. Ken has published 21 Engish-language editions, and more in Italian, Korean, and Spanish. His flagship text, Anatomy & Physiology‚ The Unity of Form and Function‚ received a McGuffey Longevity Award in 2017.