I convert a lot of fan fiction into LRF and even with the word doc I have to convert that to HTML (using Word97 seems to give the best output) I still have to go in and check to make sure the Table of Contents links work, add page breaks after chapters make sure the chapters are centered...and even after all that once the file is created I have to go in and check to make sure the links really do work (sometimes they work in the browser but not in the LRF file) and yeah it's some amount of work and I just discovered in half my conversions sometimes the italics are not showing because the html had < i > < p > instead of < p > < i >
I tried using the newer word programs to convert to html (thinking the code would have correct tags) but it just doesn't work as well as the Microsoft Word 97.
The good news is at least with Word 97 I can read the HTML and use replace all to fix things.
So basically, yeah I can see how "professional" novels would have not only typos but all sorts of formatting errors. I'm fixing shorter works but some of the fan fiction stories are novel length and at least I'm starting off with a clean electronic version.