Is there enough? I’ve often been asked this question by folks trying to get into editing or book indexing. It also applies to starting almost any business or looking for a job, of course. My first response is, “Don’t whine!” And please don’t supplicate. I can smell want-work desperation from across the conference room. It’s not pleasant. Makes me want to walk the other way. So, yes, if you act desperate and do the supplication kneel for work, it will likely walk away because of your approach. Unless the employer or prospect likes to play power games. But you don’t want corporate slavery, either. I assume.

It’s not a question of “enough.” It’s a question of finding your match. Always, always. Think about the custom guitar maker. His market is likely small (unlike the market for Coca Cola, for example), but he is in demand and makes a very good living because he provides tremendous value to those customers, and they will pay a premium for it. He doesn’t worry about general job availability statistics. He just has to stay connected to his particular “tribe,” largely through reputation, and he’ll make a great living.

But, you say, what about the newbie? That’s the whole point of the question. The new person to a career field doesn’t have connections yet, nor the expert skill set, necessarily. True. But the market, your tribe, is still there. You just need to be introduced. That’s what targeted marketing and social media are for. I only targeted ten publishers when I started my indexing business in 1995. I waited nine months back then before social media discussion groups before I got my first indexing job (because the publisher’s first choice was unavailable—after that first job, I became the first choice, not because the other indexer wasn’t available for every job, but because I was excellent!).

“Is there plenty of work out there?” I was asked the other week regarding book indexing in particular. This is a shifting career field, although the early 2000s reports of its demise and replacement by search engines have been premature. Which figures. Someday artificial intelligence may reach a level of semantic knowledge that will allow for real contextual judgments about subject significance, but the computer is not there yet.

There is plenty of indexing work out there; it’s just a question of establishing that reputation. I don’t believe in the numbers/statistics game in general with almost any occupation unless technology or something is really eliminating a way of working (e.g., buggy whips or whale-oil lamps vs. automobiles and electricity).

The thing about indexing these days is to be flexible enough to get beyond the printed book. If you’re interested in indexing, take a basic course for the mental of indexing judgment (not everyone has the right mindset), but then make sure you give yourself some self-education in the new areas (ebooks, embedded indexing, taxonomy, even information architecture) that are related to traditional indexing. That will give you more breadth to move into the future. It will pay to think outside the book covers for sure; there’s demand for linked indexes to ebooks, for example, and human-created search keywords for mobile apps that have complex subject matter.

So, I definitely see a future in indexing, although traditional print book indexing may take a smaller share of the activity. And you’ll want to market beyond traditional publishing organizations for indexing and other publishing-related services; the publishing revolution continues. You may end up working directly for writers or folks putting up websites, etc. Smaller jobs and more of them maybe, rather than larger book jobs for traditional publishers. Get your Paypal buy buttons set up and you’ll be ready to take care of credit card-paying clients as well!

Go forth, create value, and be visible!

The post Always Enough—Work, That Is appeared first on AfterWords Editorial Services.

Emma Monro over on Google+ asked a really good question the other day, and it follows on to something I saw on the television before that about how our brains work.

Recent research indicates that our brains work best on one thing at a time. Inevitable compromises occur when we try to multi-task. So all this bragging about multi-tasking abilities is really nonsense. The ones who can set boundaries, as Emma pointed out, will get more and better done in the long run.

Sources for this obsession with multi-tasking from my brain’s social science section: Might have been social expectations caused in part by

a) women moving into the workforce and still trying to do all the at-home stuff;

b) the “M-TV editing” effect in the 1980s that created expectations of rapidly shifting focus from one image to another, which was then reinforced by the way electronic tools like mobile devices and computers work, trying to con us into thinking we can do more, buy more to do more with, etc.;

c) companies putting more and varied tasks on fewer workers to save on employment costs.

All of these social shifts have created a “value” around multi-tasking. Since we’re stuck with it, so to speak, we make it into a virtue. And it’s still not one. Just an excuse to overburden people with overwhelming expectations.

So, please resist! Set boundaries! Check email/phone three times a day instead of thirty (very hard for me!). Real quality productivity will actually go up, I promise.

And you might actually have more time for surfing Pinterest pictures or taking a walk in the neighborhood later.

The post Multi-tasking—Virtue or Vice? appeared first on AfterWords Editorial Services.

This book is just genius in its directness and simplicity in dealing with customer negotiations. Like all of Loomis’s books, it’s clearly organized and easy to read through. Only three steps to great negotiations here: Get curious, know your value, understand your personal power (you’ll want to make a poster out of these and hang it up to remind you). You need to read the book for the details on how this works and the great examples Loomis gives from his own business experience.

And if you aren’t working big contracts for corporate clients, this book is still for you. Loomis’s advice works all the way down to personal relationships. Really. It’s about people, regardless of the level of interaction.

My biggest takeaway, and one I still use on a daily basis, is “get curious.” I’m one of those people who likes to talk about what I know, give advice, and guess what you’re thinking. Both Sides Now finally got through to me the importance of asking questions and not making assumptions. So now when I’m trying to figure out where someone’s coming from, I shift to coming up with a question, and that gives respect to the other and constitutes true listening. Much more gets accomplished this way, on all levels.

Especially if you are quoting projects and negotiating contracts (large or small), or even for negotiating personal relationships, listen to Loomis. He knows.

The post Both Sides Win by Logan Loomis appeared first on AfterWords Editorial Services.

One general observation I’ve made about indexers: most of the ones I know are introverts, although there are a number of weird extroverts like me in the mix. Many start out as librarians (but not all; I didn’t). Most of us do love to read, but we’re not all generalists. I index a lot of scholarly books, but some of my colleagues wouldn’t touch this material with a hundred-foot pole. They specialize in technical documentation, cookbooks, medical journals, legal documents. If one does have a good mindset for indexing, there are many niches to carve out a workspace in.

After three-plus years as the exam administrator for the American Society for Indexing‘s Training in Indexing Course, I’ve definitely seen among the students some common attributes that go with a good indexer mind, and many that do not. One has to be a bit “anal”; following specifications carefully and paying close attention to detail are both really important in pleasing clients, and many of our students have trouble with this. Also, on the opposite end of mental activity, one has to be able to see the forest for the trees and use the trees judiciously. There’s this balance between too light of a pass through material and getting too carried away putting details in an index that only two people will look up. Pattern recognition, and more importantly, semantic relationship recognition are important in the quality of the index (are appropriate synonyms dealt with? Where’s the audience likely to be coming from?). I think one of the reasons I do well at this is because I carry a thesaurus in my head. You can also use a published one, too!

But just like with editing, indexing is filled with judgment calls. Only instead of just making judgments on how the text is expressed by the writer, the indexer has to find both the essential structure and all the substantive and significant details that a writer has created in more or less linear form, and rearrange all of this meaning into a nonlinear “map” of the subject(s) so the index user can dip into the text from this condensed structure instead of having to read through the whole thing to find all the references to some subject of importance to that reader. Yes, the indexer has to categorize things, and a thematically organized document is definitely easier to index, but we have to go further than just an alphabetically organized outline of the book; we also have to decide which names, subtopics and jargon terms would be most likely to be searched for by the index user.

And then the thesaurus kicks in. It’s also important to highlight relationships among concepts and other subjects, not just deal with them as discrete things. I am always running through how these subjects I’m putting in the index (whether people or themes) overlap each other or relate to each other in some other way that might be important for the index user so they get to all the related information on a topic and not just one piece. This is the aspect of indexing that a lot of students take some experience to get the hang of.

The whole process is much less “machine-like” than folks think, although hyperlink relationships come closer than hierarchies in picturing what an index really does. But it’s not that simple, either. It’s more structured than simply browsing semantic links on the fly. This is where I get stuck trying to explain how my mind works. So many threads…one of my colleagues once gave an entire presentation on the index as tapestry, actually. Pretty accurate analogy.

When I see questions like Kate C’s, I get to think about how I think. Most of the time I just approach the text and “do my thing.” I engage my mind to read for understanding and build the index structure that will best match the writer’s intent and the user’s needs, but I don’t reflect so much on what my mind is doing. I just know that it’s natural for me to think in this way, and has been ever since childhood.

If you are intrigued by the idea of indexing, which can be applied not just to books, but to online information in websites and in mobile apps as well, the best thing is to take a short course at a local library school, or check out the distance learning opportunities at organizations like the American Society for Indexing, The British Society of Indexers, the Indexing Society of Canada, or the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers.

As another of my colleagues says all the time: Happy Indexing!

The post Indexer Mind appeared first on AfterWords Editorial Services.

And the editorial/proofreading eye is designed to make judgments, so writers and web page designers tend to feel judged when we discover things they didn’t see. It’s all about finding mistakes, which are always a little embarrassing. So I can see the desire to avoid confronting one’s mistakes and also the tendency to think that perhaps the editor or proofreader is also judging you personally and thinking you’re a “bad” writer.

I can’t speak for all editors and proofreaders, but I’ve talked to enough of them to know that, yes, we do take pride in seeing what others might miss, but we also tend to have someone else proofread our stuff. Every mind makes assumptions, especially about material we’ve seen over and over again. I would never claim that this blog is error free, for example. And lots of grammatical judgments in particularly have subjectivity written all over them. What works for one style of writing or one publishing house is forbidden with another. Just check out the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s filled with recommendations and preferences; less is set in stone than one would think.

That’s the way I like it. It allows me to collaborate creatively with my writer and/or publisher to make for the best read for their audience. A scholarly book is not going to look like a stream-of-consciousness fiction. And we have to be just as flexible as required for the folks we collaborate with.

So, contrary to “popular belief,” we proofreaders are not angry at mistakes or the ones who make them, nor are we out to puff up our egos by waving our “we’re right and you’re wrong” flags all over your story.

What do we really want? We just want to make the reader’s experience of a site or book or whatever, smooth and easy, and we want to avoid having that reader make negative judgments about the site and the person who’s offering the products or services based on some silly typo. These natural judgments that people make (that the person’s service lacks quality) are probably totally unjustified, and a little extra attention from a second set of eyes can be very valuable in projecting quality and gaining trust.

Yes, we and our “red pencil” really are your friend. The idea is to make your work the stuff people want to read.

If you’d like to collaborate, just let me know! And I’d love to hear other stories from editors, proofreaders, or writers about how the collaborative process has worked for them. Tell me your story!

The post The “Red Pencil” is Your Friend :) appeared first on AfterWords Editorial Services.