Most writing tools treat an existing manuscript as an inconvenience. You paste it in, the headings collapse, the images vanish, and three months of structure becomes one undifferentiated column of text.
Manuscript import is the opposite bet. It reads a Word .docx the way an editor would — finding where chapters begin and end, which pages are front matter and which are back matter, where the footnotes hang, where the pictures sit — and then it shows you what it found before writing a single thing into your book. You approve the split, and the manuscript becomes a project you can keep working on.
What the Importer Detects
Detection happens on the document itself, not on a plain-text flattening of it. Everything below is found automatically and shown to you on the review screen before anything is saved.
- Chapters
- Where each chapter starts and stops, from the document's own headings and breaks. Up to fifty chapters, or 200,000 words, in a single file.
- Front matter
- Dedication, epigraph, foreword, preface, acknowledgements — kept as front matter instead of being mistaken for chapter one.
- Back matter
- Afterword, appendices, glossary, about-the-author — recognised as back matter and placed after the last chapter.
- Title page
- The title and the author line are read off the title page when the document has one, and used to name the book.
- Footnotes
- Footnotes and endnotes are carried across with the passages they belong to rather than dumped at the end of the file.
- Images
- Pictures embedded in the .docx land in the chapters they appear in, at no extra credit cost.
- Rich formatting
- Headings, bold, italic, tables and line breaks survive the move, always, with nothing to switch on.
What Gets Filled In For You
An import is not only chapters. What the document reveals about the book is written into the rest of the flow, so the project is set up rather than merely populated.
The book's identity
Title, author, blurb, language and genre details are all extracted. The language is detected across more than 25 languages, and the author is taken from the document when it names one and from your account when it does not.
The story bible and outline
A chapter-by-chapter outline is built from what the manuscript actually contains — plot events, locations and turns for fiction; key topics and learning outcomes for non-fiction — so the planning step is not something you redo by hand.
The cast
Characters arrive as editable character sheets with names, backgrounds, motivations and arcs, whether you kept them in a separate section or only ever described them inside the prose.
How the Import Works
Three screens, and a quote you see before anything runs.
- 1
Upload a Word .docx
That is the only format the importer takes, because .docx is the format that carries structure, footnotes and embedded images. If your draft is a PDF, an EPUB, an RTF, a .txt file, a Google Doc or a Pages file, the upload screen walks you through saving it as .docx first — it takes about a minute.
- 2
Review what it found
Every detected section is listed: chapters, front matter, back matter, title page. If one section ran two chapters together, split it. If a chapter arrived in halves, merge them. If a section came out wrong, retry it. Nothing is written into the book until the split on screen is the one you want.
- 3
Import and keep writing
The details, characters, outline and chapters are written in as ordinary editable records. There is no imported-content mode and no read-only region: the imported chapters and the ones the AI writes next sit in the same list and behave identically.
Why This Is an Import, Not a Paste
Four things that follow from reading the document instead of its text.
You approve the structure
Chapter detection is a proposal, not a verdict. The review screen is where a manuscript with mixed numbering or a seven-part structure gets corrected by you, in seconds, instead of being silently imported wrong.
It runs on a free account
Import is not a paid feature. Notes, details, writing style and characters cost nothing at any time, and you are only asked to pay when the quote comes out above zero and your balance is short.
Priced by what you import
Chapter outlines are 3 credits per chapter and imported chapter text is 5 — 1 per chapter on your own OpenRouter key — with images and formatting included. A series import is 50 credits per book. The total is shown before the run.
Getting it wrong is free to fix
"Start over" clears everything an import created, and re-importing that book costs nothing, because you already paid for it. An existing book has its own import screen too, so a draft you dig up later still has somewhere to go.
What Comes In, and What Comes Out
A real shape of file, and the project it becomes.
The .docx you upload
novel-draft-v7.docx — a title page, a dedication, eleven chapters under mixed headings, two tables, nine embedded illustrations, footnotes on the historical passages, and an afterword.
The book you get
A book titled and authored from the title page, language detected, blurb and genre details written, dedication filed as front matter and the afterword as back matter, eleven chapters split as you confirmed on the review screen with their tables, images and footnotes intact, an eleven-entry outline, and the cast as editable character sheets.
Details, style and characters in that import cost nothing; the eleven chapters of text cost 5 credits each, and the outline 3 each. If it is your first fiction import and you have never bought anything, the whole run is free.
Import Questions, Answered
What writers ask before handing over a manuscript they care about.
Keep Exploring
What happens to a draft once it is in.
- Finish Your Book With AI — the full draft-import walkthrough
- AI Chapter Generator — write the chapters that are missing
- AI Outline Builder — restructure what the import found
- AI Book Editor — an editorial pass over the whole manuscript
- AI Book Series Generator — for manuscripts too long for one file
- AI Proofreader — a clean-up pass before export
- AI Book Writer — the whole pipeline, idea to KDP
- Pricing — what every credit buys
The Hard Part Is Already Done
A manuscript that survived years in a folder has already proved you care about it. Importing it is the step that turns that caring into a book you can actually finish, cover, export and publish — without retyping a word of what you already wrote.
Read the full how-to-write-a-book guide