Providing a comprehensive index for your readers gives your manuscript that professional edge.

Indexing is a complex and creative skill, and a good index should be a joy to use. With self-publishing increasingly prevalent, and more and more publishers expecting authors to provide an index for their book (usually at their own expense), it makes sense to get to grips with what makes a good index.

Ann Kingdom, Marketing Director for the Society of Indexers, says: ‘A great index is one that does its job unobtrusively, always taking you to just the right part of the book. Too often index users are frustrated – they know that what they are looking for must be somewhere in the book, but cannot track it down via the index.’

One of the problems with authors compiling their own indexes, Ann says, is that they are often too close to their texts to be able to put themselves in their reader’s shoes. This is a difficult hurdle for authors to overcome - to try and look at the book through fresh eyes when you have spent the last year writing the thing.

If you are determined to have a stab at indexing your own work follow the advice below to compile a basic index...

Begin by asking yourself: who are your readers? You will have given this a lot of thought when planning the marketing strategy of your self-published book or writing the proposal for your publisher. Now use this information to get a vivid picture of the index user. What will they be looking for? How will they use the index? Are they likely to be complete novices searching for basic information or might your user be an expert themselves? Or will both types of reader be using your book?

With this in mind, carefully go through your text picking out the indexable elements. These may be names of places, people or organizations, abstract ideas and concepts, anything you feel will be something the reader is likely to want to look up. As you make your list note down where in the finished book this information appears, i.e. the page number. Take extra care to get this right – mistakes made with locations are extremely frustrating to the user.

The next stage is to organize this information into headings and subheadings. Here is an example of a heading with subheadings and locators:

agents 65-92

agreements 89-90

          benefits of 66-8

          choosing 72

Note that the subheadings are indented and that every entry follows strict alphabetical and numerical order. Try to make main headings out of most of your entries, even if some of these also appear as subheadings under other main headings. Now look through your list for any possible cross-references.

Cross-references come in two types. The first is a ‘see also cross-reference’. This is used if you have a related term which is also useful and you would like to direct the reader there. For example:

conflict 71-2 see also crisis

The other type is a ‘see cross-reference’, where you direct the reader to a preferred term:

main character see lead

Take time to check and double check every entry and if possible get someone else to check it for usability, spelling, order and accuracy. Like the rest of your text, once it has gone to print it will be impossible to correct and (hopefully) your index will be around for a long time. Imagine the pleasure of knowing that your readers can find exactly what they are looking for and the enjoyment this will give them.

These are only the absolute basics which need to be mastered when compiling an index. There is, of course, a lot more to it and indexing as a profession has its own society and body of awards. As an extra skill for an author, indexing is a great choice and can be a useful way to keep the pounds rolling in while you’re waiting to be discovered. The Society of Indexers offer a home-study course and professional accreditation once qualified. Find out more at www.indexers.org.uk

So what are the most common mistakes made by beginners? According to Ann Kingdom they are: choosing headings no one would think of looking up, indexing passing mentions to subjects, sending readers on a wild goose chase from one heading to another, concentrating on proper names and failing to include concepts. A good tip is to study indexes in your own collection of books, particularly ones on a similar subject to yours. You will quickly see what makes a good index – and what makes for a useless one.

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What exactly is an ezine and why does your business need one?

Ezines are everywhere – you may even be a subscriber yourself. But for those concerned with internet marketing, the humble ezine offers huge opportunities for business promotion. Over the past few years ezines have become more and more interactive, and are no longer merely web-based versions of print magazines. They offer targeted information in a dynamic, easily digestible format, and hundreds of new ezines are appearing every week.

So how can an ezine benefit your business? Opt-in ezines and e-newsletters are a legitimate way to provide potential clients with sales information. All you have to do is write an article for an ezine – or have someone write it for you if you don’t have the time or the right skills – and include links to your product or service. Submit the article to popular directories for inclusion, and wait for the enquiries to flood in.

Sound too good to be true? Think again. Your market is both large and targeted.  It’s not uncommon for a popular and established ezine to have over a million subscribers – these are people who have chosen to receive it. Targeted because ezines cover specific topics, from health to motorsport, from accounting to woodwork – whatever your business there is an ezine out there to match it. Because people have opted to receive information about a topic that interests them, they are more responsive to the recommended products or sponsored adverts that come with the ezine.

Ezine magnates

Certain ezine publications are hugely profitable for their owners. With a mailing list of only 10,000 subscribers an ezine publisher could make as much as $5000 from one mailing. How? Through affiliate marketing; the process where one receives a small percentage of an affiliate’s sale for sending the customers to them.

Producing your own in-house ezine

This would probably start life as a newsletter, emailed to clients and offered free to visitors of your website. By asking potential customers to opt-in to a newsletter you fulfil two objectives:

1 - you capture their name and email address, and 2 – you stay in their consciousness whether they bought from you or not.

In time, as your mailing list grows, your newsletter can also grow into a fully-fledged ezine, with articles sourced from all over the web, and targeted marketing for your opted-in subscribers.

What is the difference between an ezine and an e-newsletter? An ezine is usually web-based, with its own site and associated newsletter for subscribers. Newsletters are shorter and are emailed to subscribers usually weekly.

Getting prospects to opt in

Your newsletter or ezine needs to contain information that will be really useful and interesting. Keep news-style items current and up-to-date and don’t indulge in any blatant advertising or sales-speak. Make your ezine arrival an event your readers look forward to in its own right – when they consider you an authority they will buy from you without having to be coerced. Articles for ezines and newsletters can be sourced free from ezine directories (see below) – but bear in mind the articles will have links to the author’s products or services so make sure they don’t conflict with your interests.

It’s a good idea to let your subscribers know that their information is safe with you by including the following text on the opt-in page:

We will NEVER sell or give away your e-mail address or phone number to anyone. We will always respect your privacy.

This way they will be able to give you their email details with confidence. It is also good practice to give subscribers an easy way to un-subscribe should they choose, usually with a link at the bottom of each newsletter.

Happy zine-ing!

Resources

For professional help writing your ezine or newsletter contact TaskersWebcopy

Ezine directories

www.ezinearticles.com

www.ezine-dir.com

www.bestezines.com

While the Internet has opened up many new opportunities for ghostwriters, not all of them are welcome. Online agencies like Get A Freelancer and Elance list hundreds of projects under the heading ‘Ghostwriting’, but many of these projects are actually ‘bundles’ of mini-articles for submission to article directories and blogs.

Even sophisticated surfers may not be aware of the amount of marketing that goes into virtually every aspect of the Internet today. Few blogs are written by their named authors. Many forum posts are farmed out to freelancers. And almost all of this content has an ulterior motive – to nudge, coerce or tempt the reader into a loop of viral marketing.

What does this have to do with writers in general and ghostwriters in particular? Surely the increase in the scope and variety of freelance writing work is a good thing? Not necessarily. Not when projects are advertised with budgets as low as $30 for 30 articles, and the writers who win these projects often cut and paste content from elsewhere on the web – content that already falls far short of a professional standard.

While ghostwriting is being expanded to include articles, blogs, ebooks and web content, as well as traditional printed media, the quality of the writing is diminishing – and professional writers will find it increasingly hard to complete with teams of writers working in countries where $30 is a week’s salary.

There are loads of sites out there where writers like myself can find work, some of them free, some of them paid for. The most recent I came across was a UK based resource that charged £75 a year for membership - before you even got to have a look at the quality of projects or the competition.

I don't think so!

Get A Freelancer was the first site I joined, and I've had a lot of great projects through them. Most recently I won a project to write a motivational eBook for a network marketing Guru (can't mention his name I'm afraid, confidentiality and all that...), and had great fun putting that together. But the problem with GAF is the huge competition from parts of the world where a fee of $30 is a lot of money.

Many of the buyers stipulate English as a first language but then award the project to a provider who clearly has no such thing. Why? Because they are so cheap! UK writers just can't compete on price, and as a lot of the work is for web content where neither the client nor the reader is that bothered about grammar or punctuation, we can't compete on quality either. People simply don't care!

What do I do? Skim through the listings and only bid on projects where the buyer is clearly looking for a quality provider - and where they have the budget to pay. Unless you have time to waste, give the '30 articles for $30' postings a wide berth!