Culinary Indexing SIG

Information on Indexing

Starting an Indexing Business (3rd edition) and Marketing Your Indexing Services:
A Review

by Kathleen Spaltro
© Copyright 2000 by Kathleen Spaltro. All Rights Reserved.

Many members of our Culinary Indexing Special Interest Group (SIG) are new indexers eager to establish themselves. These two American Society for Indexing (ASI) publications encapsulate the necessary guidelines that new indexers need in order to plant themselves in fertile soil. Especially valuable when read together, Starting an Indexing Business (3rd edition) and Marketing Your Indexing Services include everything you ever wanted to know about setting yourself up in business but were just too afraid to ask.

Advising indexers to write articles and attend conferences, Marketing Your Indexing Services counsels that self-improvement also can count as self-publicity. So can attempts to educate publishers, editors, and authors about the value of well-done indexes. By promoting indexing, each indexer promotes herself or himself. At the same time, self-promotion by good indexers heightens the visibility of good indexing in general. "By default, each of us represents all other indexers. This is neither magnanimous nor impractical; it is level-headed business acumen on the one hand and the way the cookie crumbles on the other" (p. 15). The group marketing in which the Culinary Indexing SIG will engage exemplifies how outreach to authors, editors, and publishers serves both our common and our individual interests.

Some of the articles in Marketing Your Indexing Services specify in great detail what steps to take. Matthew Spence's "How to Get Clients" discusses the receptivity of different types of publishing clients, establishment of one's own niche, marketing materials and approaches, the need for more experience, and financial survival. Noting how to attract referrals, Jessica Milstead's "How to Market Your Services" reveals her strategies to gain visibility. Anne Leach and Sylvia Coates stress the equally vital matter of keeping current clients happy.

For its part, Starting an Indexing Business (3rd edition) counsels readers about how to establish themselves while still working at a day job, as well as how to break into the market. Pilar Wyman's "The Business of Being in Business" gathers together some very specific and vital information about becoming and remaining a businessperson. This volume also prints some sample invoices, a model contract, and the results of the 1997 ASI Professional Activities and Salary Survey chaired by Culinary Indexing SIG member Sandi Schroeder and analyzed by Culinary Indexing SIG member Sharon Hughes.　

Review author: Kathleen Spaltro

For more information on purchasing this book, please see the following sites:
    ASI publications page
    Information Today, Inc. indexing books