Indents, spacing, and how paragraphs should start
Open a self-published paperback that does not look right and there is a good chance this is what you are seeing: every paragraph flush at the left margin, with a blank line between each one. Nothing else on the page has to be wrong. That alone is enough.
It is the most reliable tell there is, because it is not a matter of taste. It is the default of a word processor showing through onto a printed page, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it.
Books indent. They do not space.
A book indents the first line of each paragraph and puts no extra space between paragraphs. Business documents, emails and web pages do the opposite: no indent, a blank line between blocks. Both systems work. They solve the same problem — showing the reader where one paragraph ends and the next begins — and you need exactly one of them.
Books chose the indent for density. A novel runs to hundreds of paragraphs per chapter, and a blank line after each one breaks the text into disconnected slabs. Continuous prose wants to look continuous.
Documents chose spacing because they are scanned rather than read through, and a visible gap makes a block easy to skip to. That is the wrong behavior to encourage in a novel.
How deep an indent should be
An indent is measured in ems, not tab stops. One em — the width of the type's own point size — is the standard depth. In 11 pt type that is 11 pt of indent, a little over an eighth of an inch.
Some books go deeper, up to about one and a half ems, and narrow trims go shallower to keep the indent in proportion to a short line. The choice follows the measure: a long line carries a deeper indent, a short one cannot.
What it must not be is a tab stop. Word's default tab is half an inch, three to four ems of body type. At that depth the indent stops reading as a small signal and punches a visible notch down the left edge of every page. Half an inch is a typewriter convention, and it looks like one in print.
The first paragraph does not indent
An indent exists to separate a paragraph from the one above it. The first paragraph of a chapter has nothing above it, so it is set flush left with no indent. The same goes for the first paragraph after a scene break and after a subhead.
Every paragraph after that indents. This is universal in trade publishing, and it separates a set book from a poured one. Chapter openings and scene breaks covers what else happens on those pages.
Mixing the two is worse than either
Indents plus blank lines is not belt and braces. It is the worst of the three options.
You are marking the same boundary twice, with a gap wide enough to read as a section break and an indent saying the text is continuing. In a novel the blank lines start to look like scene breaks, so the real scene breaks stop being legible as anything. A book with both loses the ability to say "time has passed here," which is a real cost rather than a cosmetic one.
In the Interior Formatter. Indent depth, the flush-left opening paragraph and the absence of inter-paragraph space are set by the style you choose and applied to every paragraph in the book, from the structure it reads out of your .docx. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
When block paragraphs are right
Spaced, unindented paragraphs are not always wrong. They are correct in several places:
- Technical and reference books. Text broken up by code, tables, figures and lists is already discontinuous. Block paragraphs match how it is read.
- Some business and self-help nonfiction. Short paragraphs, heavy subheads, readers dipping in. The house style of the category is often block, and following it is right.
- Most ebooks, by convention. Reflowable text on a phone at a size the reader chose is closer to a web page than a printed page, and many EPUB houses set block paragraphs for that reason. Indented ebooks are normal too — print and ebook need not make the same choice. See EPUB and print PDF are two different books.
What is never right is choosing block paragraphs for a novel because that is how the manuscript happened to be typed.
Spacing costs pages, and pages cost money
A blank line between paragraphs is a whole line of type given up. In a dialog-heavy novel, where paragraphs are short and there are dozens on a page, that is not a trim — it is a large fraction of the page. The text spills forward and the book grows.
More pages means a higher print cost per copy, which on a print-on-demand title comes out of your margin on every sale. More pages also means a thicker spine, which changes the cover, and past certain counts a larger inside margin, which takes more lines off the page again. Printers have ceilings too: KDP accepts 24 to 828 pages in paperback and 75 to 550 in hardcover. See Margins and gutters and Spine width.
So put no indents in your manuscript at all
The indent belongs to the typesetter, not the writer. Its depth is a number in points, set against the measure and type size of the finished book — neither of which exists while you are writing. Your manuscript should carry no tabs, no leading spaces, no manual first-line indents. Not shallow ones, not consistent ones, none.
Tabs and runs of spaces arrive in a typeset file as literal characters inside the first line, adding to whatever indent the style is already applying. The result is a book with two indent depths in it, and finding them afterward means reading every paragraph. Strip them before you import and let the style do it once, everywhere. Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly has the rest of that list.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly · Back to How to format a book interior · Also: Running heads and page numbers · Type size, leading and the line that reads well