Support for Indie Authors discussion

It turns out that if you follow their suggestions, as to formatting your blurb, you end up with a mess. And their help desk is worse than useless:

     Recently, when I was releasing, The Portal to Sygano, I wasn’t satisfied with the way the blurb appeared. As originally written, it had several short paragraphs that, with double-spacing between paragraphs, looked way too choppy. So, I decided to use single spaced, indented paragraphs for a cleaner look.
     If you’ve worked with translating text to the HTML presentation code you know that leading spaces and tab characters are ignored, so to indent, other means are required. But that varies widely, depending on which version of HTML, or competing codes, the site uses. Many sites do the translation for you. Amazon, it turns out, doesn’t.
     Making the problem worse, Amazon doesn’t let us preview the blurb before release. So any change to it means that the entire publication process must be repeated, which often takes most of a day to complete. So my first attempt, with leading spaces, and a line feed in place of a paragraph mark, resulted in no indentation or paragraph spacing, a heartfelt, “Damn!” from me, and a quick return to the original configuration, rewritten to have fewer paragraphs (which took overnight to show up).
     Determined to find an answer I searched for acceptable to Amazon HTML codes, and it turns out they have a page where they’re listed…but it’s defective. But paragraphs can be indented, which is the reason for this thread.

     Someone in the Amazon tech-writing crew screwed up. They give instructions for creating an indented paragraph with a single line feed below it, but, the code they indicate is standard HTML code to mark an enclosed paragraph with no indentation, followed by a double line feed. So, the day after I changed my blurb per their instructions, it had no indentations, but did have double line feeds, plus the line feed I put in at the end of the paragraph, yielding triple spaced paragraphs and a really ugly blurb.
     I was not happy. (Forgive the length of this, but what follows is relevant)
     I contacted Amazon’s author help-desk to report the problem. I even included the problem line from their page. Their response was to refer me to that line on that page as the solution to my problem. It was signed by someone named: Priyadharshini.
     I wrote back to Priyadharshini, pointing out that the suggested fix did exactly what standard HTML documentation said it did, which was not what Amazon claimed. That response, and two others after, were ignored. And reporting the problem on Amazon’s HTML page changed nothing.
     That, along with the recent change in the “Look Inside” feature, from being active on publication to not appearing for weeks afterward, demonstrates Amazon’s lack of commitment to supporting independent publishing.
     But that aside, the good news is that there’s a way to create indented paragraphs in blurbs, and they look much better. In fact, they look like this post, which was created with that same technique. Interested?

Creating indented paragraphs in an Amazon Blurb:
NOTE: Because this site responds to the same command, and would respond by changing it to a space, so you can see it, I’ve used upper case letters. For your blurb, use lower case.

1. Each leading space (5 are used here) is indicated by a “nonbreaking space” command. It’s part of a class of simple commands that begin with an “and sign: &” and end with a semicolon ;. In this case, it’s:   So for my blurb indentation, and here, each paragraph is preceded with:       (with lower case letters). No space is used between commands or between the last space command and the first word of the paragraph.

2. To end the paragraph just hit a single return key, so the next line has no blank space between it and the previous paragraph.

That’s how complicated it is. You replace the spaces that would indent with commands to insert a space. You have to wonder both why Amazon got it wrong, and why no one there is smart enough to fix it, even when it’s pointed out.

Maybe someone thought along the lines of "blurbs are supposed to be short, so why would anyone bother formatting them?"

Honestly, it's an interesting question why it's so screwed up, but I wonder if all of this would be worth the trouble for 100-150-word text (the recommended length around here).