Authors know about us, because most of them have the indexing fee deducted from their royalty payments. Otherwise, we're a fairly low-profile, unknown group of individuals scattered around the country. Our names are never included in the acknowledgements in the front of the book. Still, indexers perform a critical task. Imagine a cookbook without an index.
Most people rely on the index to find what they are looking for.
No matter what type of cookbook, the process is usually the same. I get a phone call from a production editor, who asks if I have time to create, for example, an 8 to 10 page index for a 300 page cookbook about breads. We discuss rates, style specifications, and other details. The book arrives the next day, and I get to work. I go through every page, read every recipe, every word of the boxed and sidebar text, and analyze illustrations.