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Importing Your Manuscript

How to Import Your Manuscript

  1. Click Import Your Manuscript on your project dashboard
  2. Select your .docx file from the dialog
  3. Wait for automatic processing (typically 5-30 seconds)

What Gets Imported

Document Structure

Chapters, front matter, and back matter are created from your heading styles. Subheadings are preserved.

Text Styles

Bold, italic, alignment, and other formatting transfer with your content.

Ornamental Breaks

Scene dividers like *** or ### are automatically converted to ornamental break elements.

Images

All images import alongside your text, ready for your book.

Other Elements

Footnotes and tables transfer and are properly formatted.

What You’ll See After Importing

Your manuscript opens in the editor with sections in the left sidebar and a live preview on the right.

Lacuna editor sidebar displaying imported chapters as sections, with tabs for navigation, search, and elements

Quick verification: Check that chapters appear correctly in the sidebar and content displays properly in the preview.

Next Steps

Learn the Editor

Master the toolbar and formatting

Explore all formatting tools and shortcuts for efficient editing. Editor toolbar guide →

Organize Structure

Arrange chapters and sections

Reorder, rename, and restructure your imported content. Organize sections →

Choose Design

Apply professional styles

Select from book styles that match your content. Book styles →

Add Metadata

Set publication details

Add title, author, and publishing information. Book metadata →

Troubleshooting

My import is taking a long time

Images are the most common cause of slow imports. Each image has to be processed individually, so manuscripts with many images take longer.

Things to check:

  • Large images — Are your images several megabytes each? Consider compressing them before import.
  • Many images — A book with hundreds of images will naturally take longer than text-only manuscripts.
  • Image format — Lacuna only processes JPG, PNG, and WebP files.
My sections aren’t structured correctly

Lacuna creates sections based on your heading styles. If your structure looks wrong, the issue is usually in how headings are formatted in your document.

Things to check:

  • Are you using Heading 1? — Every chapter or section title needs to be formatted as Heading 1, not just bold or large text.
  • Inconsistent headings — If some chapters use Heading 1 and others don’t, your structure will be uneven.

Review our import best practices guide to ensure your document is set up correctly. You can always re-import after fixing your headings.

Some of my content is missing or merged together

Without clear heading styles, Lacuna may merge content into a single section or split it unexpectedly.

How to fix it:

  • Copy and paste text between sections in the editor.
  • Create new sections and move content manually.
  • For best results, fix the heading styles in your original document and re-import.

The import best practices guide covers how to format your document for clean imports.