Workflow Wednesday · Word Crafters

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Workflow Wednesday

Moving In (Bringing Your Existing Work Into the WCP Binder)

Here's a thing I hear almost every week in some form: "I'd love to try WordCrafter, but I already have three books started somewhere else. Do I have to start over?"

No. And the reason matters, because a lot of the fear around switching tools is really fear of losing work. So this week we walk the whole path, from "I have a pile of files" to "my book lives in the Binder, tagged, sorted, and ready for the rooms."

One promise first: importing doesn't touch your originals. Whatever you bring in is a copy. Your old files stay exactly where they were.

What You Can Bring With You

WordCrafter's importer handles most of what writers actually have:

Word (DOCX)

Plain text and Markdown

EPUB

PDF (including a scanned or image-based PDF, via the OCR option)

HTML, RTF and ODT

Scrivener projects

NovelCrafter exports

RaptorWrite exports (JSON or Markdown)

Sudowrite import was still being worked on the last time I updated this list. If that's your source, export to Word or Markdown and import that instead. It's a reliable bridge.

A test I'm proud of: I exported all nine of my NovelCrafter projects and imported every one of them. If you started something somewhere else, you can finish it here. And if WCP turns out not to be for you, there are multiple ways out too, including Word, EPUB, PDF and Scrivener export.

Step 1: Make Somewhere to Put It

Import always lands in a book. This is where the Binder trips people up, so here's the picture that makes it click:

A Series or Group is a file cabinet.

A Book or Type is a drawer in that cabinet.

Your folders and files are the pages inside the drawer.

Those names are loose on purpose. Your "Series" could be a pen name, a genre, or a pile of short stories. Your "Book" could be a novel, a collection, or a drawer called "Old Drafts."

So before you import anything:

Click + New in the Binder and create your Series or Project. You can convert one to the other later with a right-click, so don't agonize over it.

Right-click it and add a New book. This is the drawer your import will land in.

Make sure that book is the one currently selected. The importer sends everything to the current book.

My advice: make a fresh book for the import instead of dumping it into something you're already working on. If the result is a mess, you delete one book, not untangle two.

Step 2: Ten Minutes of Prep on the Source File

You don't need to clean your manuscript. But a few small things make the import much cleaner:

Use consistent chapter headings. If your chapters are labeled "Chapter 1," "Ch. 2," "03 Homecoming," and "The Long Road," the importer has less to hang on to. Markdown with clear chapter separators gets split into separate chapter files automatically. Word files with real heading styles behave better than ones where you just made the text big and bold.

Check your PDF. If you can click and select text in it, it's a text PDF and imports normally. If it's a scan or a PDF made of page images, choose the PDF with OCR option so WCP reads the pictures into text. One warning from experience: some PDF exports run words together at the source. If that's what you've got, find the Word or EPUB original if you can.

Skip the images unless you need them. PDFs with pictures can send them to your Gallery, but the Gallery has limited storage, so don't pull in a hundred page scans by accident.

Tables come in on a best-effort basis. Check them afterward.

Step 3: Do the Import

Open 📤 Export / Import in the toolbar and choose the import option for your format. You'll pick between a single file and a folder of files.

What to expect:

EPUB: it comes in as a folder named after the book, with the chapters and front matter as separate files inside. You don't have to chop it up yourself.

A folder of files: pick the format (DOCX, TXT, MD and so on, or PDF with OCR) and everything in the folder comes into the current book in one go.

Markdown with chapter separators: it splits into multiple chapter files.

When it finishes, refresh the page if anything looks odd. That's the universal fix for most weird display glitches in a web app, and it costs you two seconds.

Step 4: Walk the Binder Before You Trust It

Don't open the rooms yet. Spend five minutes looking at what actually arrived.

Count the chapters. Does the number match what you wrote?

Check the order. Drag files into the right sequence. Order matters for every room that reads them later.

Fix the titles in one move. Right-click the folder and choose Renumber Chapters. It renames and renumbers everything in the order the files currently sit, so "Ch. 7 - The Fall," "chapter two: Smoke," and "03 Homecoming" all become tidy "Chapter 1," "Chapter 2," "Chapter 3." (Sort the order first, because it follows the order it finds.)

Set the file types. Right-click each file to set what it is. Only files typed as Chapter count toward your book's word total, so if the total looks low, this is why.

Check word counts. Each file shows its own count. A chapter that shows 40 words probably lost something in the import. Compare it to the source.

If something landed in the wrong book, you can move files, folders and whole books between books and series with the right-click Move option.

Step 5: Set the Three Boxes (This Is the Step People Skip)

Every file row has three little boxes: B, S and ¶. After an import, they're almost certainly not set the way you want. New documents arrive with ¶ already ticked, which is right for a chapter and wrong for the note you scribbled at 1 a.m.

¶ (prints in the book): leave it on for the actual manuscript chapters. Turn it off for notes, research, outlines and anything that isn't the book. This also keeps your word count honest.

B (this book's AI context): only tick what the room needs for the job in front of you. Don't tick everything. More isn't better. It costs more and gives you muddier answers.

S (shared with the whole series): use it for things that are true across every book, like world rules, recurring characters and the Series Bible. If you're bringing in a series, the Series Bible should be titled exactly Series Bible, live in Book 1, and have S ticked.

The checkbox on a folder cascades to everything inside, so one click handles a whole folder. Before you export or share this later, check the word count. If it reads higher than the book you think you have, something is ticked that shouldn't be.

Step 6: Sort the Non-Chapter Stuff

Your old project probably came with more than chapters: a story bible, character notes, an outline, research. Give each its own file type (Story Bible, Character, Outline, Note, Research) so you can find them again. If you turn on Create typed folders in the + Add menu, new characters land in a Characters folder, notes in Notes, and so on. Scenes and chapters never get moved, which is how most of us want it.

If you don't have a story bible, don't panic. You can make one after the fact. That's Step 7.

Step 7: Now Bring In the Rooms (In This Order)

This is the part that turns "my files are in WCP" into "WCP is working for my book."

Cold read first, before anything else. If you plan to run the Editorial Room, do the reader cold read (ORACLE) before you or anyone analyzes the book. You only get one genuinely cold read of a manuscript, and the moment any analysis starts, it's gone. Tick your chapters, open the Editorial Room, and ask for it.

Build the missing documents. No story bible? Tick the chapters and ask the Story Development Room to reconstruct one from what's on the page. Part of a series? Open the Series Room and choose Initialize from Existing Work. It pulls out the cast, timeline, world rules and open threads, and it flags anything it had to infer so you can confirm it. Read those flags. A bible built from a skim and trusted blindly is worse than none.

Let the rooms tell you what they're missing. If a room doesn't have the documents it wants, it will say so and offer to create them. Take the offer. You'll get better results than shortcutting.

Save what they produce. Use Create file in Binder or Insert into Editor under the response, then tick the new document into context. That's how a chat answer becomes part of your book.

A real example: I imported a 13-chapter novella that was meant to be a full novel and was honestly a mess. After the bible was rebuilt and the draft run through BookCrafter, it came out as a 29-chapter novel at more than double the word count, in about two hours. The bones were fine. They just needed to be visible.

Traps to Avoid

The AI doesn't know what the Binder is. A model in the chat window has never heard of WCP's parts. One member asked a reasoning model to "send this to the Binder," and it invented its own imaginary binder, with folders and files that didn't exist. The fix is to use the buttons under each response, not to ask the chat to do the filing.

Don't import into a book you're mid-draft in. Make a new one.

Check the metadata afterward. Open the book's metadata and set its pen name and genre. Don't assume the import carried them over.

Don't tick everything for context. After an import you suddenly have forty documents. Choose.

One more look at the originals. Keep them until you've walked the whole Binder. You probably won't need them, but it's cheap insurance.

Today's Mission (20 Minutes)

☐ Create a new Series or Project, then a new Book inside it.

☐ Import one thing: a single chapter file, a folder, or an EPUB. Just one.

☐ Walk the Binder: check chapter count, order, and word counts.

☐ Run Renumber Chapters on the folder if the titles are messy.

☐ Set ¶ on chapters only. Turn it off on anything that isn't the book.

☐ Post what you brought in, and how it landed, in the thread.

If something broke, tell us. I can't fix it if I don't know it's broke.

You don't have to import everything today. You just have to move one thing in and watch it work.

So here's my question: what's the oldest file in the folder you've been avoiding? The one that's been sitting there longest? Tell us what it is. That's probably the one to import first.

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Workflow Wednesday