: Re: What paragraph style should I use for an e-book? I have often heard of the advice that "use a style that works best in your situation". In regard to paragraph styling for an ebook, there

@Annie587

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As others have noted, if you're writing for a magazine or someone else's website or a publisher who adheres to a specific style guide, then they'll probably reformat anything you submit to their style anyway and it's a moot point.

If you're self-publishing or it's otherwise up to you, I don't know that one can say much more than: use a style that you find attractive and readable and that is not likely to confuse your readers, whether it's about paragraph breaks or any other point of formatting.

My thoughts:

If you're using software that lets you create style sheets -- like HTML or MS Word and many others -- use the style sheet to control the paragraph breaks. If you've manually added blank lines between every paragraph or typed in spaces at the front of the first line of each paragraph or whatever, and then you change your mind, you have a ton of work to change them all. But if you did it with a style sheet, you can reformat an entire book with a few keystrokes.
I avoid using both indenting and blank space between paragraphs. Use one or the other. Using both is overkill.
An advantage of using indenting to show a new paragraph is that you can then use a blank line to show a slightly bigger break. Like in a novel, you can use a blank line to show a break between scenes.
A bit of practicality: Using blank lines takes more space and thus makes the total length of the printed document longer. So if you need to pad your document, for example if you're writing a book and after you say everything you want to say it's only 100 pages and you think this just looks too thin and unimpressive, one thing you can do to pad it out is to put blank lines between paragraphs. Other things would be to add more chapter breaks, as this gives you an excuse to leave more blank space at the end of each chapter; always start new chapters on an odd-numbered page, which means you'll sometimes have a blank page between chapters; use a larger font; etc. Conversely if your book is too fat, like you think 400 pages just looks too intimidating for your target audience, then remove blank lines from between paragraphs, etc, to reduce the page count.

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