How to index a book – or not

Arsenic, arson, Bulwer-Lytton….

Apart from the obvious difference between fiction and non-fiction – one’s pretend and the other isn’t (more or less) – a non-fiction text should have an index.Indices are awesome, a handy way to zip around a book without having to wade through the entire tome, but have you ever stopped to wonder what compiling an index involves?

This is something I have been wondering since I started work on Poison Panic, for the simple reason that my book would need an index....