Page Proofs and an Index
I am publishing my first solo book, Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss, with Routledge. It comes out on October 19, 2026, and I am writing the production journey as it happens — submission, cover, blurb, copyedit, and now page proofs. This is the proof stage.
On Friday, my book came back looking like a book.
It is no longer a manuscript or just a group of chapter files. Page proofs are the stage when the words are typeset into designed pages, with real margins and running heads and chapter openers, the way they will look in print. After sending the file submission in June, the cover design stage that came not long after, the blurb for the back cover, and the copyedited files that arrived just a few weeks ago, this is the stage where the book resembles the object it is becoming: a published book.
This stage came as a PDF of the whole typeset book, and with a surprise attached: the corrections do not go back on paper. They are typed into an online proofing system, where a textual fix is entered straight into the text and a question or an instruction has to be flagged separately as a comment. There is also a button marked Finalize, and once it is pressed nothing more can be changed. I am so careful not to hit it by accident!
The proof also arrived with two sober facts attached.
The only look
This is my one review of the full proofs. My publisher’s process, like most, does not send authors a second revised set — corrections go back in and are checked internally, but I will not see them again before the book is in the world. So this pass is the pass. Every typo caught now is caught. Every one missed is in the book. No pressure!
That concentrates the mind in a way I did not expect, and it changes how you have to read. Proofreading at this stage is not editing. The argument is settled, the sentences are settled, and reopening either one is not what the pages are for. What is left is a different and much narrower job: looking for what slipped through.
What I caught first was not dramatic. An editorial note in Chapter 4 — a leftover from an early draft, a message to myself that had survived the writing, the submission, and the copyedit, and was sitting in typeset pages looking perfectly at home. A paragraph in Chapter 8 that made the same point twice. Small things, both of them invisible to me until the pages stopped looking like my Microsoft Word file and started looking like a book.
And the error I had been braced for since spring was not there at all. A figure whose underlying markup I had flagged months ago as broken had typeset correctly; the problem never made it into the proof. That is the part important to anyone dreading this stage. The thing you have been worried about is often already handled, and the thing that gets you is a note you wrote to yourself two years ago.
The index is the author’s to build
The second fact is that the index is mine. At the proof stage, once the pages carry real numbers, the author builds the index — the map at the back that lets a reader find synchronicity, or continuing bonds, or a particular theorist, on the page where it actually lives.
Indexing your own book is a peculiar act. You stop reading the work as an argument and start reading it as a set of locations, deciding what a future reader will most want to find and where they will look for it. It is the closest I have come to seeing the book the way a stranger will.
My publisher’s guidelines set the shape of it: a list, in a word processor, sized to roughly eight pages of the proofs, which works out to about sixteen MS Word pages of terms. My first pass came in at 934 entries across 1,329 occurrences. Well over. So most of the work has not been building the index. It has been cutting it.
I cut a quarter of it, by rules rather than by taste, applied in order: entries that only ever appeared in passing, authors cited a single time, long phrases that occurred once and once only. Nine hundred and thirty-four down to seven hundred. No heading was reworded and nothing was merged, and every cut entry sits on a separate list, restorable, with the rule that removed it written beside it. The Foreword is not indexed at all — preliminary material is excluded, which I did not know until I read the publisher’s guidelines.
Then the page numbers go into the index, and not before. Some of the corrections remove text, so any locator filled in before the pages settle is a locator thrown away.
Proofreading is reading for what slipped through. Indexing is reading for what someone else will come looking for.
If you are heading into proofs
A few things I would tell a client, and am now telling myself:
- Read the proofs in a different medium than you wrote in. Print them, or read them on a device you never draft on. Familiarity is what hides errors, and changing the format you work in can break that so you can more easily see mistakes.
- Read for mechanics in separate passes rather than all at once — running heads and chapter openers in one pass, hyphenation and bad line breaks in another, the reference list and every figure caption in another. Trying to see everything at the same time is how you see nothing.
- Start the index earlier than feels necessary. It is not a clerical task appended to the proofread; it is its own read of the whole book, and it takes the time it takes. In mine I am budgeting 30 hours for the task. Today, I made it about 220 entries before my eyes were getting tired and I had to stop, and that happened over 3 work sprints of 2 hours each.
- And resist the pull to improve a sentence. The urge is real, the deadline makes it worse, and at this stage the cost lands on other people. If you change too much and the pagination is altered, the book has to be adjusted again.
- And read your publisher’s indexing guidelines before you index anything, rather than after. Mine set a length, excluded the front matter, and would have saved me a good deal of work I had already done if I had read it in advance. But, being me and wanting to get ahead of the work, I created a 1,500 entry index that I just had to cut down, instead.
The part that is not mine
It would be easy to describe this stage as a solitary one — an author alone with a stack of pages. It is not. These proofs exist because a typesetter set them, a copyeditor went through the manuscript line by line before that, and a production team is holding a schedule I am only one date on. One of my favorite fiction authors, Antonia Hodgson has a line in her novel, The Raven Scholar, that says, “You are not the only bird, Raven!” When your book is in production with a professional publishing house, you are not the only author they are working with. Being mindful of the human beings working with you to produce your book is a great way to see the process as a collaboration. The pages look like a book because people who are not me made them look like one.
It takes a village to raise a book, and the page proof stage is when you find out how much of the village was working while you were not watching.
The quiet before it is real
There is a strange stillness here, too. The writing is long done. The editing is done. What is left is careful, finite, and final — a last walk through the pages, a map drawn at the back, and then the letting go.
I have spent years helping other people reach exactly this point in writing their books, dissertations, and articles. Doing it for my own book, I understand more directly why I keep telling authors that the last stretch asks for a different muscle than the writing did. The writing asks for invention. This asks for surrender — trusting that the village has done its work, and that it is time to let the book be finished.
The corrections and the index are due back on Monday, August 31. Between now and then I am reading on weekends and splitting the weekdays between my own book and other people’s manuscripts, which has its own strangeness: spending a working day walking a client toward this exact stage, then coming home to my own pages.
So that is where I am this week: reading slowly, building a map, and getting ready to send it back to Routledge for the last time.
The patience of publishing.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
I write about the making of this book, and about grief and meaning, in my newsletter The Meaning We Make. You are welcome to follow along.