Newb question about metadata

[BookJunkieLI]

I apologize if this has been asked/answered before but I'm either not using the right search terms or I'm not understanding the answers given in the posts I've read that seem to be about a similar problem.

I just purchased a Nook after many many years of using first a Rocket eBook and then an Ebookwise reader, after my cat killed the Rocket. While I do use my ebook to read 'official' books I primarily use it to read fanfiction that I've downloaded from the net.

Long story short I literally have about 3,000 fanfic 'book' files and another 2,000 or so actual books in various formats - doc, html, rtf, txt and pdf. I'm in the process of weeding out the duplicates and any incomplete versions of a story/book before I begin the process of adding them all to Calibre so that they can be converted to ePUB to be uploaded to my Nook. The finalized versions of my files are being created as html using either Word 2002 or 2007 depending on the computer I'm working on. I've already figured out that I need to make sure that they are encoded as unicode (utf-8) for them to convert properly to ePUB format. It took me two frustrated hours and sleeping on it for a night before I remembered seeing somewhere that it needed that encoding to be converted to ePUB. Apparently Word doesn't automatically use that encoding unless you tell it to.

My current problem is that when I add them into Calibre none of the metadata is coming across - ie proper title (unless it's the file name), author, series or tags. I suspect I'm not putting the data in the correct place however I can't find anywhere in the FAQ that tells me where/how I should be listing that information in the original file. I don't know if the Grand Tour video tells me that information as none of my computers, and least none of the computers at work where I currently am, will bring up that page without errors allowing me to view it. Not that it would help much since I don't have sound at work.

So the question is, exactly how do I need to setup my files so that Calibre will automatically bring in that information? Yes, I know I can go in and manually fix it but I was under the impression that Calibre would do it automatically and I don't relish the thought of having go thru several thousand books updating information that I already did once before. Is it related to the file title? The file properties? Something else?

My file titles range all over the place but generally are as follows:

story title.html or
fandom story title.html or
fandom story title by author.html

or if it's part of a series

fandom series title #.html or
fandom series title # story title.html

They *all* have the following information in the Properties field

Title: Story Title or Series Title #: Story Title
Subject:
Author: Author's name
Manager:
Company:
Category: Fandom name
Keywords:
Comments:
Hyperlink base:
Template: Normal


Thanks in advance for the help. Frankly, I'm extremely surprised that this sort of information is not already included in the FAQ on the website. This, to me, seems to be the most basic information that's needed to be able to properly add your files to Calibre in the first place. But that's just me. I am looking forward to getting this working properly as it seems like it has the potential to be a great program.

Beth