Importing Into Microsoft Word

Import without Formatting
No matter what format your book has been written in, whether as a series of blog entries or in a Notepad file, it will be necessary to reformat it into a Word document. This is the most widely-accepted file format used by most publishers and has everything you need to make a real book.

In my case I selected all of the content in each of my blog entries (by clicking and dragging) and then pasted each blog entry into Word. I originally did a straight Ctrl-V paste, which was a mistake and caused a few headaches. The correct way to do this is to Rt click and then select the 3rd box under Paste Options (Keep Text Only). This can also be done with Rt click-T.

Remove Blank Lines
Next, we want to get rid of blank lines in between paragraphs. These look good in blogs but not in books. Do this by Ctrl-H, and then replace ^p^p with ^p (this replaces 2 carriage returns with 1). If there still empty lines remaining then repeat this command. Later we will put spaces in between certain types of paragraphs, but it will be done through the Styles feature in Word in a future step. Because we imported by copying and pasting with Keep Text Only, there shouldn't be any "manual line breaks". These occur in blogs as well. Just in case, you can get rid of these by Ctrl-H and replacing ^l with ^p.Now we have a Word document which is continuous text with no formatting at all.

If you are starting from a manuscript in a Word document, it's still a good idea to do the above. Select All (Ctrl-A), Copy (Ctrl-C), open a new Word doc, paste and Keep text only (Rt-clk-T). Remove all blank lines (paragraph breaks and manual line breaks).

Pictures and Tables
If your source has pictures then this process will not include them in the new document. It's better to reinsert them manually. However at this point remember to remove any captions (which do get copied over). If the source has tables then they will not transfer over properly. Ebooks do not handle tables very well at all. The best way to preserve this kind of content is to recreate them as bulleted lists. This is a real pain in the ass, but the first step is to do a regular copy and paste of the source table into your document. Then select the Table tab in the top right corner. In the tab bar click Layout on the far right, then Convert To Text (I use "Other" with a 1 character space as the delimiter). From there it's a manual process of finagling.

Remove Hyperlinks
If your blog entries have lots of links then these should be delinked.  Press CTRL+A to select the entire document and then press CTRL-SHIFT-F9. Then change all colors to black and de-underline the whole document.

Next we will start Adding Chapter Titles.