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

Additional Resources

How To Easily Format Poetry For Ebook Publishing

Book Design: Formatting Poetry Gets A Lot Easier

Quick Tips

This article is part of my Quick Tips series. Articles with around ~300 words that give you advice that’s easy to implement. If you have your own quick tip related to being a non-fiction author or self-publishing, connect through our Write For Us page.