Inside Indexing

Inside Indexing, by Sherry Smith and Kari Kells, is about the decision-making process of writing indexes for books. It serves as a window into the minds of two back-of-the-book indexers as we both indexed Eben Fodor's text

Better Not Bigger: How to Take Control
of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community

We provide detailed descriptions of our indexing processes as we explore the causes and consequences of our decisions. As we describe what happened as we indexed the book, we reveal the problems we encountered and the solutions we developed.

You may see both of our individual indexes, parts of each were used in the index which was published in Fodor's book. You may also view the table of contents and the index to the book we wrote to get a sense of our overall approach.

A number of prominent indexers have reviewed what we said there, and have made comments.

We have also made ordering a copy of the book as easy as possible.