Tag: book indexing software

Book has no Index

Blog – I do not have time to write an index for my book! … Can i just skip it?

hesham
Book has no Index The short answer is “No”. You should not skip the index section if you want your book to succeed.

Imagine that you have written a home medical book guide. Sarah, is a mother who purchased your book, and one day she had to stop her child’s arm from bleeding, after an accident she had. She rapidly opens your book. She has no time to examine the book content, so she moves to the index section. As anxious as she is, she looks for the term that comes to her mind “stop bleeding” or “bleed stopping“. Due to your hard work in establishing the best index for your medical guide, In the “S” section of the index, Sarah easily finds the first term that she thought about “stopping bleeding“. Sarah moves to page 231 in the guide where that term refers to in the index, and she was able to take care of her child’s injury in a matter of minutes, because of the reliability of your book and its index.

Now, suppose in the above situation that Sarah opens your home medical book guide, and tries to find the index section, however, she then realizes that there is no index guide! … That will give her impression for how terrible your book guide is! … So, saying that you do not have time to write an index for your medical guide is surely not an excuse for such situation!

You might now say: “I’m now convinced that i should create an index section for my book, but still, i haven’t got time to do that. Furthermore, index building is a very tedious and time-consuming task. I’m not an index builder; I’m a writer!” … I have two easy suggestions for organizing your book index:

  1. We have created a book indexing program called PDF Index Generator to manage and organize your book index tasks. Simply follow its four steps to obtain a professional index. You will need some time to learn how it works, but if you index a lot of books, you will get used to how it works. It will save you a lot of time over doing it by hand, and save your money. You can test the program yourself by downloading its trial edition, which is fully functional, but it just indexes the first 10 pages of any book that you choose. That should suffice you to determine whether or not the process would be straightforward for you to accomplish. You can start by watching the video tutorials to understand how to use the program.

  2. We have also set up a book indexing team to build your book index without you having to do anything. This will save your time, rather than completing such a time-consuming task on your own. Our extremely low prices are the biggest benefit for this. Unlike other indexing services, we determine our costs based on the amount of words in the book rather than the number of pages. That implies you only pay for what you have. We’ve indexed 300-page volumes for as little as USD 200, perhaps less.

It’s now your choice to make the correct decision! Whenever you get the chance, send us a message and we’ll send you an estimate for the amount it would cost to construct your back-of-book index!

Blog – Creating a names index for your book, with names sorted by last names

hesham
Many authors would like to see the indexed names for their book index sorted alphabetically according to last names instead of first names. Some even create a separate index for names only if their book has many names, like some historical books. The following video explains in full details how to accomplish that with the least effort required:


The tutorial explains how to use the PDF Index Generator program to import your list of names, then it generates the index for you, and in simple step you can reverse all names and write the index to a PDF file. The process only requires couple of minutes to have your index ready.

Index your book in 10 minutes

Blog – Indexing all names in a book just in 10 minutes!

hesham

Index your book in 10 minutes Congratulations!

Finally you have finished writing your book. Now your publisher asks who is doing your book index. Of course you can hire an indexer, or you can create the index yourself. Sometimes creating the back of your book index is much easier than you think, and that is what i am going to explain in this article.

Below is a historic book that has many names, and i want to create a names back-of-book index for this book. You can preview or download the PDF book from here to check it:

Preview/Download PDF book
Historic book

Believe it or not; i have indexed all names in that book just in 10 minutes. The names in my book are all written in bold font, so with the help of the book indexing tool PDF Index Generator; i have commanded it to index any text in the book that has bold font. In short here are the steps that i have followed:

  1. I have run the program, and i have selected the book that i want to index.
  2. I have commanded the program to index all bold entries in my book and ignore any other words found inside it.
  3. The program has started collecting those terms from my book and their corresponding pages numbers. It took less than one minute to do that.
  4. The program has then showed me the results and gave me many editing options to edit those results. I have just asked it to merge all duplicates in order to merge names having the same spelling but different case sensitivity, like “Ibrahim ibn Sinan” and “IBRAHIM IBN SINAN”. This took only a couple of seconds.
  5. Now i am done. I have then asked the program to write the index to a PDF file. You can check the final index from here:

    Preview/Download PDF book
    Historic Book Index

Marvellous! … If you want to index terms in your book that have a specific font format; like bold entries or italic entries, or entries having a specific font name or size, then i advise following the same procedure. And if you want to index all the names in your book but those names do not appear in bold, you can still index them using PDF Index Generator, as it has two other useful features which can help you do that; the “Include queries” feature and the “Include categories” feature. I will try to explain them in later posts   🙂

To index my book or not to index it

Blog – To index my book or not to index it … That is the question!

hesham

To index my book or not to index it

Any author who finishes writing his first book will mostly ask these questions:

  • Do I really have to create an index for my book? Can’t I just skip it?
  • An index is just an old fashion. Does anyone still use that?
  • Isn’t there any program to create that index for me?! … We’re in the 21st century!

Well, let’s answer those questions and try to help you decide whether or not to create an index for your book.

Do I really have to create an index for my book? Can’t I just skip it?

Since you’re the author, it is up to you whether you decide to include an index for your book or not. But the reader might have another opinion. If your book is a non-fiction book then the reader will surely need an index for it, and the index should be well made. To convince you, you should know that a good index will help increase your book sales.

Let me show you a practical example…

David is a guy who wants to buy a non-fiction book that is of the same field of your book. He is not looking for a specific title but the book he wants should cover some information he needs, so he goes to a book store; the librarian directs David to the corner of books he might be interested in; David starts checking the books in that corner. Since David is a smart guy; instead of checking the contents of each book he starts checking the index of each book to save his time. He starts searching for specific terms he needs to be sure this book will answer the problems he is facing. After checking the indexes of a couple of books he finally reaches your book, opens it and he happily finds all the terms he was looking for in your book index. Now he opens the pages of some of those index terms to be certain that the information is covered in full details inside the book. His eye sparkles “That’s exactly the book I want”, said David. David happily orders your book. He is very happy with this successful purchase he made.

In short; a well done index is what sells a book. If your book does not have an Index, your book reader will be totally lost. If your book has a good index, then this increases its chances of being found easily, and orders will increase.

An index is just an old fashion. Does anyone still use that?

The index is not just used to help the reader to decide whether to order your book or not. Here are some other common cases for how the book index is used by readers daily:

  1. David has read your book 2 years ago. Today he wants to look for a topic he remembers that he has read in your book. He can easily find it through the book index if the index was well made by checking one or two terms concerning this topic. That saves him a lot of time.
  1. Janet is a researcher. She is in the library looking for books with specific topics that could help her complete her research. Your book index was so helpful for her. When she opened the book index she found a topic she was looking for, and since you were using cross-references in your book index. The topic she found has referred her to other helpful topics also in the book. She was very happy with that good index.
  1. Ashley is a historian. She was looking for books talking about some famous people in history. She has a list of those names she is looking for, but of course she doesn’t have time to read all historical books from cover to cover to find those names. She starts checking the index of each historical book that she has, trying to find those names out there. Luckily your book index is professionally made, and you have added all the names in your book in its index in a nice reversed way like “Lincoln, Abraham”. Ashley was able to easily look for all her names in your book index in 2 minutes with the help of your well organized index.

Those were 3 random scenarios just to show you how every reader has his own case and reason for using your book index. All your book readers will use your book index, today or tomorrow. Be assured of that.

Isn’t there any program to create that index for me?! … We’re in the 21st century!

You’re right. We’re in the 21st century 🙂  … You wrote your book, you’re the best one who knows its most important terms and topics, and you’re the best one to create its index if you just have the suitable tool to help you do so.

You can use the indexing program PDF Index Generator to help you create your book index. No program will ever replace the human mind and do the entire index without any effort from you, but PDF Index Generator reduces and organizes your book indexing work so you can do it yourself in the shortest time required.

All you have to do is read your book. Consider it as a fast review for your book. While reviewing it collect the most important terms inside your book in a text file, each entry in a separate line. This step will be the most effort you make. After finishing this step you will run the program, copy and paste the collected list to it, and let the program do the magic. It will generate the index, grabbing the pages numbers of each of your collected terms, and then you can write the index to your book. If you need more sophisticated index like defining cross-references, headers& sub-headers, changing the fonts and colors of the index, etc. All this is available through the program advanced options.

And finally you will get a nice stylish index suitable for your book and totally professional for your different book readers. Here are some index samples created using the PDF Index Generator program:

I just hope I have thrown light on the index issue and clarified it for you. Now the decision is yours whether to index your book or not. The decision is now yours  😉