I cannot for the life of me get linebreaks in an epub

The only solution I figured out is:

1. You create two paragraph styles. Say one is your basic one that runs through the entire manuscript. 

2. The other style should have an indent (before and after). That depends on how much spacing you want. The text and font size and everything else will be same. Make sure to duplicate your first basic text layer. 

Hope that helps 🙂 

Where are you uploading the epub? If you are uploading to Amazon, you need to convert the file in kindle create then upload it. But if you already uploaded to Amazon in another format, then you need to create a new ebook and start over since Amazon does not allow you to upload more than one format after already uploading one. If you can't get the epub to work there are paragraph settings in Indesign to adjust it. However, to solve the problem completely with kindle you need to separately format the file in Kindle Create (which is free by the way). I had this problem after calling Amazon 7 times. So your better off just using Amazon's program, especially since they updated their software and the regular Indesign epub files are not converting well. Hope this helps! 

EPUB, like its HTML roots, inherently removes all duplicate white space, including multiple paragraph returns, tabs (converted to a space) and multiple spaces. You can't do spacing with multiple returns, tabs, spaces or anything of the like.

It usually removes soft returns (line breaks), and it's good practice to avoid them in layout, but there is an export option to allow or remove them. The spacing above and below, and left and right margins are the way to control text and paragraph spacing. (There are some gotchas with that as well.)

Spacing pretty much passes through from ID to EPUB, but it's tricky, and the ratio of one point to one display pixel (usually 144ppi) is not always clear.

Spacing above elements cannot be directly controlled. If you have spacing above a secondary heading and that heading falls at the top of a virtual page, it will be spaced down from the top. There is no automatic space-collapse as ID, Word and other layout programs manage it.

But ask away if you have any further problems. Most have solutions.

ETA: Didn't see this was an old thread. And while we can give answers to specific problems, some topics (such as EPUB creation) are broad and complex and it can be difficult to give a simple answer when a user doesn't have the full context of the process. I try to give answers on EPUB/Kindle creation that will help a newbie over a hump, but those answers may not be enough if a user doesn't have a full grasp of how the answer applies to their problem.

Training, of one form or another, is the complete answer. 🙂

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I have returned to this page several times. I would like to report both Bob Levine and Derek Cross for being very unhelpful to put it politely. Their community professional credentials should be revoked. Either answer the questions or dont say anything at all. Saying "go get training" or "you're in over your head" is just obnoxious and these guys have no business being in help forums. 

Bear in mind that when you choose to make a reflowable publication you are giving up full control. You are letting the viewing software make its layout decisions for you, and these decisions will be very different on diffferent device and apps. Some may squash your content or spread it very much, so blank lines will be sacrificed. Don’t worry! Your job is to deliver what matters: the content. 

If you can explain why, in a particular case, you feel you must break the reflow with extra blanks, new lines, or blank lines, someone may have a solution, or can tell you you cannot control it. Screen shots may help. 

told me to use a paragraph style that had "space after" the places where i needed it.. so i did that... and it didnt work.. any other helpful tips?

Also, space after should work, but the epub’s relative space amount will be different. It will be defined as a margin-below in device pixels, while InDesign’s space below is the print output dimensions. Here I set a space below as 150 pixels which equals 2.083" when printed. You can also see the tabs and multiple returns are collapsed:

If you're on a Mac BBEdit is an excellent application for editing ePubs.

But you need to understand some concepts, such as no page size, no page numbers, no Master pages, all text to be styled (paragraph and character styles), all images to be anchored. You will be very lost until you get some training.

If you truly know nothing about HTML or CSS you're in over your head.

What version of InDesign are you using?

Creating Reflowable ePubs is not intuative. I suggest you take a LinkedinLearning online video course on creating Reflowable ePubs. They are in English but there is transcript. You can get 30-day free access.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/me