It is unlikely that anyone using a computer today is not familiar with Microsoft’s ubiquitous word processor “Microsoft Word” (MS Word). It is used for wide variety of document creation tasks. Professional designers and printers will scoff at the idea of using MS Word for any serious designing or printable file creation, but MS Word is a powerful common man’s tool. Its learning curve is not steep and features have become increasingly rich over time. Today most of the common formatting requirements of most books are easily covered by MS Word. Hence, a large number of writers use MS Word for writing and even formatting their manuscripts.
MS Word 2007 and later versions have native support for converting the documents to PDF. HTML conversion has been in place for much longer. But conversion to EPUB is tricky. There are a few roundabout ways of converting your Word documents into EPUB. This includes
- Using a tool like Aspose.Words Express: This tool takes a Word documents, interprets the styles and creates an EPUB from it. You might need to make adjustments to the converted files. You can use a tools like Sigil or directly manipulate HTML/CSS to achieve this. Now, you can also import this EPUB to InstaScribe and make changes!
- Word to HTML to EPUB: You can save your word file as HTML, import it in Calibre and then export as EPUB. The quality of EPUB generated might not be great. But you can make adjustments as above.
- Convert and sell through Smashwords: Smashwords has some strict formatting requirements in Word. If you can satisfy those, you can upload your files there. They do automatic conversion to various formats and also help in distribution.
InstaScribe plans to have a Word Import feature soon. After that you can make changes and adjust the formatting directly in InstaScribe’s WYSIWIG editor. For the time being, you will have to copy-paste the content.
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