The Last Thing I Will Ever Do to This Book (Or, What an Author Index Actually Is, and Why I Built Mine by Hand)
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 have been writing the production journey as it happens — submission, cover, blurb, copyedit, page proofs. Today's post is about the final step before publication.
On Sunday I sent the corrected page proofs and the index of Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss back to my publisher. That was the last thing I will ever do to this book before it is published.
There is no second set of proofs. There is no round where I get to reconsider a paragraph or a typo. In the online proofing system my publisher uses, there is a button marked “Finalize,” and I have spent the last week being so careful not to hit it by accident. It does not ask twice!
If you have never taken a book through production, the proof stage is the one where your manuscript becomes a book. The typesetters send back the pages as they will print — the running heads, the figure placement, the page numbers that will be printed in the paper copy someone eventually holds in their hands. My proof ran 181 pages. I read every one of them, in order, over several days.
What you are allowed to do
What you are allowed to do at that stage is correct. What you are not allowed to do is write. A typo, a wrong citation year, a figure callout pointing at the wrong figure — those are corrections, and I logged thirty-seven of them, plus twenty-two checks against the reference list. A sentence I would now write differently is not a correction. If I change enough words, the pagination moves; if the pagination moves, the typesetting team has to reset pages that were already right, and the index I am about to describe stops being accurate.
And then there is the index
Because the other half of the proof stage is the index. And most of the time, the author builds it.
That surprises people. It surprised me the first time I saw it in a client’s contract. The publisher will hire a professional indexer if you ask them to, and they will bill you for it, but the assumption in academic publishing is that the person best placed to say what this book is about is the person who wrote it.
Here is what I did first.
I built a term list, and then I went through the proof page by page and recorded every page where each term appeared. It took about thirty hours across a week. Nine hundred and ninety-seven locations. I was proud of it. And when I assembled the whole thing and read it back as a document, what I had was not an index. It was a concordance — a list of every place a word occurs. Three hundred and sixty-nine of my entries pointed at exactly one page. Terms that were the actual argument of the book were under-represented, because the argument does not always announce itself by name, and terms that meant very little were all over this early concordance draft of the index.
An index is not a search function. A search function tells you where a word appears. An index tells you where an idea is discussed — which means someone has to decide what counts as a discussion, and that someone is the author. My spreadsheet could tell me that the word grief appeared on a hundred and forty pages. It could not tell me which four of those pages a reader would actually want.
So I built it by hand. The finished index is three hundred and fifty-four entries, fourteen of which are pure cross-references pointing somewhere else, thirty-five of which have subentries underneath them. The thirty hours were not wasted — they are what taught me the difference, and I read my own book far more closely than I would have otherwise. But the index that went to Routledge is a judgment, not a search.
If you are heading into this stage yourself
If you are heading into this stage yourself, the two things I would say are these.
- Read your publisher’s indexing guidelines before you build anything, not after.
- And when you sit down to make the entries, do not ask where does this word appear. Ask what will a reader come looking for, and what will they call it when they go looking.
The book is out with Routledge on October 19, 2026.
The part that is not mine
It takes a village to raise a book, and this stage is where you meet the rest of the village — the typesetting team who reset the pages, the copyeditor who caught what I could not see, the production editor keeping the schedule honest. They are working on several books at once, and mine is one of them.
I expected to feel something larger on Sunday. Mostly I feel quiet, and a little bit like I have set something down. The book goes on without me now, which is, after all, the point of writing one.
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.