Restructuring/revising a manuscript (word) in Scrivener

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi,

I would really appreciate some advice on the following (before I do anything stupid):

I finally received the reviewer’s comments on my book manuscript, and I actually liked their suggestions for some restructuring. The manuscript was originally written in Scrivener, and then painstakingly formatted in Word. Also, it is 120,000 words, with footnotes, appendices, TOC, no illustrations but indications throughout the text where they are supposed to be etc…

Obviously, the restructuring (breaking apart two chapters and redistributing their contents) would be best done in Scrivener (duh…), but for some reason, the idea of importing the document freaks me out. I think I am scared of losing the formatting and then having to do everything AGAIN (on a very tight deadline) after exporting it into docx when it is done.

Could somebody please calm me down with reasonable arguments, or help me out with some tips re best practices? This is my first book, and every step seems scary…

Many thanks!
Rondonraita

2

Best practice: Make lots of backups.

In particular, backup the Word document before you import it.

In a worst case, you can use Word’s Compare Documents features to compare the Scrivener-generated restructured Word document to the original and accept the changes one-by-one.

Katherine

3

Thank you, I really appreciate your quick reply! And I’ll definitely back-up the sh… out of everything. But more specifically: I used styles in Word for “indented paragraphs” and “non-indented paragraphs” with an empty line above, some for “dialogue”, “blockquotes”, “epigraphs” etc. Will I have to re-apply all of them in the new word document after revision, or can Scrivener keep them somehow? :confused: