Is it possible to save text effects to easily apply to copy and pasted text?

[iamtheblues]

You might want to explore Adobe Illustrator's Graphic Styles "A graphic style is a set of reusable appearance attributes" is how Adobe help describes it.
This may be worth it, if you have lot to do. A free trial of Illustrator will work for 30 days and you may be able to import your Xara work into Illustrator to save some time (and decrease the Illustrator learning curve).
Illustrator won't recognize certain aspects of Xara's features, like some fills and transparencies, so you would have to make some aspects of your designs directly in Illustrator.
The neat thing about Graphic Styles is that they can all be saved and used in new projects. You may be able to get a legal copy of Illustrator CS5 or 6, which has this feature so that you don't get involved in the Creative Cloud debacle. Anyway, the link I provided in my first line will give you an insight into what it can do and whether it's worth investing any time & money away from Xara.
Bob.