Kindle formatting for poetry

Yes, it is possible!

I'm a Nook girl, but having the opportunity of turning my poetry book into a Kindle book (via KDP), I decided to make my book available for at least one e-reader brand.  A couple of days later, I have just finished the rough draft, which works on every conceivable Kindle there is (except maybe Paperwhite?  I guess we'll find out.).

Rather than ramble on about the process (which I may do later), here are some key points I learned:

1. Each line of poetry constitutes a paragraph.  I investigated the possible solutions for widows and orphans that I could find (incl. div's around the stanzas, with page-break-inside: avoid;), but because of this fact (and also, perhaps, limited CSS compatibility), it is impossible to eliminate widows and orphans.  The spacing/margins/font-size flexibility on e-readers results in drastic changes on your pages' length/appearance, and the safest thing to do is to do nothing.
2. Universally-accepted hanging indentations are possible.
3. E-books just aren't very fancy.  You get bold, italics, font size, and that's just about it.  Even the Twilight Kindle book looks boring inside.

Most of my techniques follow this tutorial, by Charles Walley.  He provides you with a really clean template and takes you pretty much step-by-step through the process, including Table of Contents and EASY hanging indents.  I was going to give up before I stumbled across his tutorial, so (needless to say) I'm really grateful for it.

I believe I have also figured out how to properly save/publish the e-book file so that Table of Contents shows up in Kindle Previewer...more on that in a future post.