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Writing and Publishing, Part 30:
Becoming your own publisher:
Design and Manufacturing Techniques Continued:
The third part of the book:
Sometimes there is not much to justify a third section for our
book. This can be true for fiction books. I have never seen an
exposition type of book which did not justify at least some supplemental
material. Even in fiction books, I like to offer some contact
information for people who want to order more copies. This can
just be an extra page on the final chapter.
In addition, the third section of the book may contain advertising, reference information, supplemental materials, and an index. Although the same pointers on layout will apply for our third section, we may want to use different master pages. We may want to have a different page numbering scheme. We may also want to call this section an appendix. This may be true if we have an index or tables to insert, or just a large amount of organized information. Lets look at some of the things we could have in the third section.
I have already cautioned against excessive advertising in our supplemental material. It makes no sense at all to pique people who are paying us money for our books. Offering an order blank or contact information, for those who may want it is quite enough. We can even offer a catalog, wherein we can legitimately place our advertising. It's really self defeating to attempt to use our literary offering as a catalog in drag.
In expository books, this third section is the best place to put a list of reference material. Here is where we can own up to the fact that we are not all knowing and omnipotent. We have learned from other sources and people. We also allow our readers to supplement the information we have given them. This reference material is in addition to the specific acknowledgments, which we put in the front of the book. Those were for direct help which we may have received.
We can also put supplemental material in our third section. this is material which is not essential to the point or theme of our book, but may be of interest to some people. It adds to their understanding of the subject. One example of this is a short essay on numbering systems, which I put in my last book, "The Anatomy of a PC." It is not necessary to understand numbering systems to build a PC. The essay simply adds to the person's understanding of the subject.
A favorite of math books is to put the solutions to exercises in the appendix. Math and other scientific books are also likely to have standard tables like trigonometric functions or logarithms. Remember that stuff from highschool? In some books, we might also want to have a glossary of terms and acronyms. I had one of these in my computer book.
Probably, the element most likely to be poorly constructed or even missing from a technical book will be the index. This is the content reference table in the back of the book. We should not confuse a table of contents (TOC) with the index. A TOC is in the front of a book to help you find major sections of the book.
An index is in the back of the book and it is set up on key words or phrases. Its purpose is to help us find specific informational references and descriptions. It is alphabetical and it references particular page numbers, wherein the referenced data can be found. An index is essential for many technical book. One example is this book, which will be indexed when it is produced. The fact is, a technical book without an index will be a hard sell to a library.
I believe the index is often bad or missing for one, or both, of two basic reasons. One is because the need for it is not understood. The person who creates the book does not understand that people will want to use his work as a reference for specific snippets of information. Even many publishers, it seems, do not understand this concept of a book being used as a reference. Why don't people just read the darn book? In fact, we usually do, but, later on, we need to verify some information and we don't have time to reread the darn thing.
The other, more powerful reason for a bad or missing index is, a good index is difficult to create. We may ask, "Is indexing an art or a science?" I personally believe it's a learned skill, like cobbler. However, like cobbler, it requires an aptitude. Part of that aptitude comes out of a love of solid organization. There must also be a love of language such that good phrasing is natural. This is crucial in creating the keys which are the index. We can liken an indexer to the person who built the very first pyramid. He must have the soul of a poet and the mind of an engineer.
We can discuss much more on indexing, but the point is, it's a rare skill. For those who want more, the PMA newsletter, Volume 19, Number 2 has a useful article about indexing by Dan Connolly. http://www.pma-online.org.
This concludes the discussion of book layout. Next time, I
will get into considerations for cover design and layout.
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