What David says in his second link above is what I do. I layout lots of books and never have time to play with the Word files first. What I’ve done is set up a book/page layout template in InDesign which includes Paragraph styles like body text etc. but, for this purpose, several Character Styles: Italic, Bold, Bold Italic etc. I use a plugin called MultiFindChange from http://www.automatication.com. It’s brilliant because you can put a whole list of changes you’d like to make to the Word file as soon as you import it.
When you import the Word file, don’t do anything to it until you’ve run through the Find/Change sequence, either one at a time or using the MultiFindChange. Hope it helps you as much as it has helped me. I love it!

Isn't there a problem with deleting, say, pages 1-49 if the text flows as one story or one table? Because it just flows along and starts on the page 50 you're left with (don't suppose I'm explaining this very well)? Deleting a page doesn't actually delete any text although you might only find it in the overflow box thingy.

It would be better to have a script that actually breaks the text where you have the cursor. I know there's a Break Text script that comes with InDesign but I've never been able to make it work, it does very weird things.

aextra software used to make an absolutely brilliant plugin called Clever TextLink which could break the text in all sorts of ways, was easy and worked every time. But they haven't done anything about CS5 which is a huge shame.

I set up books for a publisher (helion.co.uk) all the time. If your authors submit their Word documents following your company's strict format/guidelines, then why not set each chapter as a separate file. When you want to run Find/Change you just open all the documents and specify All Documents in the Find/Change box.

When you've set up the chapters, set up a new Book file. Add the chapters in the right order. Synchronise the styles by clicking in the little box to the left of the chapter name in the Book list and then synchronise by going to the flyout menu.

As for covers, it's so much easier recently because you can set up 3 pages (for a paperback, 5 for a dustcover) as a spread and each page can be a different size (there's a page tool in the tools bar and you can set individual page sizes/margins there). The publisher I work for likes to have the covers 6 months in advance, so the spine width always changes. Again, it's easy to change the width with the Page Tool — and you can also move pages with this tool to accommodate the changed spine width.

That's just my opinion, of course. There are always a squillion ways of doing the same thing!!

Tim Cole wrote a really interesting piece in his blog <https://blogs.adobe.com/indesignchannel/2007/11/anchored_frames_productivity_s.html&#62; about shortcuts to place an anchored frame precisely in the margin for side notes. I used it successfully in a very long book that had footnotes and side notes.