The Ten Words That Make Your Book Findable
Inside a Real Copyedit — Post 5 of an ongoing series. I am publishing my first solo book, Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss, with Routledge; I turned in the finished manuscript in June 2026, and it is now in production. Each post in this series follows that real copyedit, one author query at a time.
Most of the queries in my copyedit were about the manuscript. One was about the reader I have not met yet.
This author query arrived as a small administrative ask — the copyediting team asked me to supply up to ten catchwords in a separate file. The same task is waiting for you at the end of your dissertation, journal article, or your own book.
What catchwords actually do
Catchwords are the terms attached to a book for discoverability — the words that decide whether your work surfaces when someone searches for the thing you spent years writing about. They are not a summary. They are not a table of contents in miniature. They are the vocabulary a stranger is likely to type when they are looking for something and do not yet know your name. These are the same as keywords for dissertations and journal articles, but for books, instead.
My ten
Here is the list I sent, more or less as it went:
- synchronicity
- grief
- bereavement
- mourning
- meaning reconstruction
- continuing bonds
- after-death communication
- disenfranchised grief
- phenomenology
- analytical (Jungian) psychology
Ten words for a book of about a hundred thousand. Seeing them stacked like that is a strange experience — it is the least nuanced version of your work that will ever exist, and it is also the version most people will meet first.
How I chose them
Three questions did most of the work:
Who is searching, and in what language? My list has two registers on purpose. Grief, mourning, and bereavement are close cousins, and a tidy writer would cut two of them as redundant. I kept all three, because a clinician, a scholar, and a bereaved person who found their way to a library catalog do not use the same word for the same thing. Then there are the specialist terms — meaning reconstruction, continuing bonds, disenfranchised grief — which no general reader will ever type, and which are precisely how another researcher will find me.
What is the book actually indexed under, in the conversation it belongs to? Not what I wish the field called it. What the field calls it. After-death communication is the established term for phenomena I might have described a dozen other ways in the prose; the prose can be mine, the catchword has to be theirs.
What is method, and what is subject? Phenomenology and analytical psychology are not what the book is about. They are how it was done and where it is standing. Someone searching for grief research within a Jungian frame needs those two words to find me, and no amount of synchronicity will substitute.
What I cut was harder than what I kept. Several of my favorite phrases from the manuscript — the ones I would use to describe the book at a dinner party — did not survive, because nobody is searching for them. That is not a small loss. It is just not a loss that belongs on this list.
The same task, wearing a different name
If you are finishing a dissertation, you will be asked for keywords too. ProQuest wants them. Your institutional repository wants them. Your first journal article will want them, usually while you are exhausted and treating the submission form as an obstacle between you and being finished.
I would gently invite you to treat that form as the last real writing task of the project rather than the first clerical one. Your keywords are how your work gets cited by someone you will never meet. A dissertation nobody can find is not one that can be cited.
The exercise is small enough to do in an afternoon and worth doing badly first: write twenty, walk away, come back and cut ten. Ask a colleague outside your subfield what they would type. Check what the three sources you cite most often are indexed under, and borrow their vocabulary where it fits.
And then let it go. Ten words cannot carry a hundred thousand. They only have to carry someone as far as the door.
The patience of publishing.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
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