How do I export an Obsidian novel to Word for my editor?

First, fix the order

Obsidian has no book order of its own. A novel kept as one note per scene or chapter is only as ordered as its filenames, and many tools sort those letter by letter, which puts Chapter 10 before Chapter 2. A shell's *.md does exactly that. Rename the notes with zero-padded prefixes — 01 Arrival, 02 The Letter — and the order becomes the same in every tool that reads the folder.

Give each chapter note a single # heading for its title and leave scenes under it without one, or with ##. That is how Word will later know where chapters begin.

Joining the notes into one Word file

Pandoc, the free document converter, does it in one command run inside the novel's folder:

pandoc 01*.md 02*.md 03*.md -o novel.docx

Name the files in order, or use *.md if the prefixes already sort correctly. Pandoc puts a blank line between files, turns # into Word's Heading 1, and keeps italics. To get double spacing and a manuscript font without restyling afterward, restyle a copy of Pandoc's own reference file (its manual shows the one-line command that writes it out) and add --reference-doc=styles.docx.

A few Obsidian habits do not survive the trip:

• [[wikilinks]] come through as literal brackets unless you switch on one of Pandoc's wikilink extensions, and even then they point nowhere useful in Word.
• Embedded notes (![[Scene]]) are not expanded. The embedded text is missing unless you paste it in.
• Properties at the top of a note are read as metadata; a title there may print as the document title.
• Comments written as %%like this%% may print as text. Delete them first.

If you would rather not use a terminal, community plugins can help. Longform assembles scenes into a single compiled note in the order you set, and several export plugins wrap Pandoc behind a menu command. Plugin features change. Read each plugin's current documentation. Obsidian's own Export to PDF exports only the note you have open, with its embedded notes expanded in place, and produces no Word file.

In Tabularia

Choose Import folder as new manuscript, pick the vault's folder, and the note tree becomes chapters and scenes. Notes are read in path order with numbers compared as numbers, so Chapter 2 comes before Chapter 10 even without zero-padding, and images the notes refer to come along and are placed where the prose mentions them. Check the imported Outline against the vault before you retire either.

The DOCX export then writes chapter titles in Word's heading styles, with no review markup or comments left in it. It does not add page breaks or a running header, so an editor who wants those gets them in Word.