Okay, I had a character style (3pt, 23 shift up) for when a quote mark started off a Drop Cap in a chapter, which must have been interfering and causing every other paragraph to adopt it. Seems to be working great now, with my word styles mapping over.

One hurdle down!
One more question: Should I place the file, or replace it into the master page I have already waiting? Or does it matter?

And: I would like to start my chapters after an odd page break, and have the chapter heading start around a third of the way down the page. Can I put this into paragraph style? Or is there a way to create this rule?

Thanks David. Yes, I’ve seen various tuts that cover bits and pieces of what I am looking for, or to see (As Dwayne pointed out) what is possible, and what will be needed to be done part by part. I’ve done some stuff in Photoshop where I can record actions, but I think that is a different animal here. The mapping of styles looks like it should be of some help, unfortunately the video won’t play, saying I am not logged into lynda.com?

Thanks, Dwayne. As for the easy button. Not really what I was looking for. More a prep accordingly, and the task will be easier sort of approach. Since I am starting fresh in Word, I was looking to see if I prepped a template designed for the transit into Indesign, if that could cut down some of the steps involved.
Of course, I was hoping all those little things could be automated, or some of them!
Since a lot of the heavy lifting is done around chapter starts, I do recall seeing a bookmarking feature. If I can bookmark all the paragraph headings for the chapter numbers, I should be able to navigate a little quicker. Of course, I am just laying out novels, with a little extra front and back matter, so I should probably count myself on easy street compared to a lot of the projects ID is designed for!
I’ll go tinker some more, and see what I can find.

Thanks for the feedback, David and Dwayne!

I should have added that this is a novel, so 99% simple text. I figured the resize, which worked, would have also resized the text boxes. And the original sized text would have just autoflowed out past the end of the pages I had configured. But the text boxes (still from the 6×9) are sitting on top of the new smaller pages, and I can’t figure out how to make the boxes conform to the same margins I had originally set up, but on the new smaller pages.

I planned to just fiddle with the font scale until I got everything to fit with the line and kerning tinkering I had done. I would leave it, but the rest of the books in the series are going to be in the smaller size, so I wanted them to be consistent. And this is for POD, so I will need to get it in shape on my end.