How I used Claude to build a 5,000-entry index for a 600 page technology book without going crazy. The hard part of indexing is not inserting tags, but you will want to automate the boring mechanical labour.
I have spent the last couple of years writing a book about Embedded AI for No Starch Press (NSP). It has been three times the amount of work that I was expecting. The editing process feels never ending and by the end you will never want to read your book again. It does make for a better book though, and I am now an advocate for having an external editor.
One of the more tedious aspects of putting together a book is index tagging. The publisher can index for you, but it will cost around $4 per page and this comes out of your royalties. Not many people get rich writing a book, but there is no point throwing away hard earned royalties! There are lots of things you have to do manually when creating a book (like writing), but this feels like a task that a Large Language Model (LLM) should be good at.
NSP expects the finished index to weigh in at 5 to 8 percent of the manuscript word count, so for a 100,000-word book you are building something in the range of 5,000 to 8,000 words. This is a substantial document in its own right.
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