Essential Poetry ebook Formatting Tips

Do you need help with your poetry ebook formatting?

I’m taking a slight diversion to my publication schedule and releasing an impromptu poetry book “Bodrum: A travel memoir in verse”, so have been researching best practices for formatting a poetry ebook.

I wanted to share some good resources for formatting a collection of poetry with you. Hopefully this will save you some time if you have a poetry book of your own to format and publish for mobi or epub.

Poetry ebook Formatting using HTML

Tips on how to format each time and verse in html:

Source: http://www.docxtoebook.com/

All your poetry lines should already be wrapped in p tags. In order to have your lines formatted correctly, including hanging indents for lines that wrap, wrap each stanza in a div tag and a “stanza” class. For example:

<h1>The Snow Man</h1>

<div class=”stanza>

<p>One must have a mind of winter</p>

<p>To regard the frost and the boughs</p>

<p>Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;</p>

</div>

Poetry ebook and print book formatting

3 videos from Derek Murphy about formatting poetry, word formatting for poetry, and advanced poetry book formatting:

Source: http://www.diybookformats.com/format-publish-market-book-poetry/

You can start with the templates from DIYbookformats or just open a new document; but I strongly encourage you to watch the 3rd video and learn how you can make your poetry book go viral with amazing typography and full page images. Derek Murphy

Additional Resources

How To Easily Format A Poetry Ebook Before Self-Publishing

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2015/04/book-design-formatting-poetry-gets-a-whole-lot-easier/

[bctt tweet=”Quick Tips for formatting your poetry ebook” username=”JayArtale”]

Quick Tips

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