I have a manuscript that I've "perfected" over several years and I'm trying to publish. Was going to go through ingram spark because they have the ebook plus print on demand. But I cant figure out their book cover design tool. Tried amazon kdp but the documents save as a pdf and its formatted all wrong on the preview. Has anyone self published poetry?
I haven't published any poetry (and I haven't written any for a few decades), but I have done several books through Amazon KDP. I don't see any reason why the book wouldn't be formatted correctly. I recently formatted a heavily-formatted book for a fellow author, and it came through perfectly -- but I created the PDF, not Amazon. Did you upload a Word .docx file, or did you upload a .pdf file? If you uploaded the word processing file, I can see the possibility that whatever internal process Word uses to convert the file might not recognize your formatting. Word has the capability of exporting directly to .pdf, and it's pretty good about preserving the format of the document. If you are using Word, try that. (Be sure from the export to PDF window you open the "Options" tag at the bottom right, and be sure the "Save as PDF/A" choice is checked. That embeds the fonts you used. Not necessary of you use Times New Roman, because every system in the Universe has that font. Anything else, embed the fonts to be certain. If you don't write in Word, see if your word processor exports to PDF. If so, try that. If not, try using a virtual printer to create a PDF you can upload. The one I've been using for years is doPDF. It's a free download, and it works well.
It was a word doc. That I donwloaded as a pdf to upload. The format was wasn't correct on the preview though in terms of the stanzas. I didn't check the format for the original pdf file before I uploaded though so it might need correcting.
Why don’t you upload your poetry book on this website instead? It’s got ebook plus print on demand plus it’s totally free of charge. The website you’re opting for is not free of charge. Also you’ll probably find it more convenient to upload that pdf. https://www.feedaread.com/Information/About-Us.aspx