Over the course of writing a non-fiction book, you’re going to grab text from plenty of sources as you do research. Examples include:

• Webpages.
• Other books.
• Articles.
• Images.
• PDFs.
• Podcast transcriptions.

Copying and pasting text from these sources willy-nilly into your manuscript is bound to cause problems that will bite you in the ass when your designer lays out your book. You’re also going to change the case of your text from time to time. Do it manually if you like, but my go-to over the past decade has been Convert Case. (Microsoft Word’s features here are sorely lacking.)

I can think of a dozen other instances in which writers typically manipulate text in a manual way, such as removing extraneous spaces, shortening URLs for endnotes, sorting lists, and turning commas into lists. What if there were a powerful, affordable, and customizable tool that could save you precious time (couldn’t resist) manipulating text as you wrote your book?

The Next Book Format

A Whole New World

I just stumbled upon PopClip. It lets you quickly do each of these things—and so much more—after you select a block of text. Its extensions are downright sick. It’s only for Macs, but there’s evidently a Windows alternative.

It even works in Notion.

You’re welcome.