The markdown to type, what it renders as inside the EPUB, and the Kindle failures to avoid
To format a scene break in an ebook, put a visible, centered marker — three asterisks (* * *) or a decorative ornament — on its own line, and use the same marker for every break in the book. Never use blank lines: ebooks are HTML underneath, and HTML collapses empty space, so blank-line breaks disappear when the file is rendered on a Kindle. In a markdown manuscript you type a single horizontal rule (--- or ***) between the two scenes and the converter turns it into a properly-styled break.
Almost every guide on this topic assumes you write in Microsoft Word or Vellum, and stops at "center three asterisks." This one is written from the other side of the file. We build EbookFormatter's EPUB generator by hand — it reads your markdown and assembles the ebook byte by byte — so we can show you not just what to type, but exactly what a scene break becomes inside the finished book, and why the usual mistakes fail on a Kindle.
A scene break (also called a soft break or section break) is the small gap inside a chapter that tells the reader something changed: time jumped forward, the point of view switched, the camera cut to another place. It's weaker than a chapter break — the story continues — but stronger than a paragraph break.
The marker itself has a name: the dinkus. Traditionally it's three spaced asterisks, * * *, centered on their own line with space above and below. An older form is the asterism, ⁂ — three asterisks stacked in a triangle — which has fallen out of favor and is now nearly obsolete. Modern books often replace the plain dinkus with a small decorative ornament or fleuron (❧), especially in romance and fantasy where readers expect a bit of flourish. Literary fiction and thrillers tend to keep it plain.
This is the mistake that fuses two scenes together in a self-published ebook, and it's worth understanding why it happens, because the reason is baked into the format.
An EPUB is a bundle of HTML and CSS — the same technology as a web page. And HTML has a rule about whitespace: runs of spaces, tabs, and line breaks are collapsed down to a single space, and empty paragraphs are routinely stripped. That's a documented behavior of the CSS white-space model, not a Kindle quirk. So when you hit Enter four times in your manuscript to "make a gap," those blank lines have no reliable existence once the file is converted and re-rendered. On one device they might survive; on a Kindle they usually collapse to nothing, and the reader sees the end of one scene bleeding straight into the start of the next.
A visible marker survives because it's actual content — a paragraph with a character in it — not empty space the renderer is free to discard. That's the whole reason the dinkus exists.
There's a second, subtler reason a visible marker matters, and the Chicago Manual of Style names it: a break signaled by blank space alone "is likely to be missed" when it lands at a page boundary, because the flush-left line that follows reads as a continuation of the previous paragraph. On a reflowable ebook there's no way to control where the page breaks — the reader sets the font size — so a whitespace-only break can land at the top or bottom of any screen. A printed marker is the only thing that can't be lost to pagination.
If you're writing your book in markdown, a scene break is one of the simplest things in the whole manuscript. Between the two scenes, put a line that contains only a horizontal rule, with a blank line above and below it:
The door closed behind her, and the house went quiet.
---
Morning came grey and late. Tom hadn't slept.That's it. EbookFormatter accepts any of the standard markdown horizontal-rule spellings for a scene break — all of these parse to the same thing:
--- (three or more hyphens) — the most common*** (three or more asterisks)___ (three or more underscores)* * * (spaced asterisks)- - - (spaced hyphens)Pick whichever you find easiest to type and stay consistent — they all produce an identical break, so there's no "right" number of asterisks to agonize over. The marker the reader sees is controlled by the ornament style you choose at conversion time, not by what you typed in the source.
Here's the part no other guide shows you. When EbookFormatter converts your manuscript, each horizontal rule is turned into a centered scene-break element:
<div class="scene-break">* * *</div>styled with CSS that centers it, adds breathing room, and — importantly — tells the reading system not to strand it:
.scene-break {
text-align: center;
margin: 1.5em 0;
letter-spacing: 4px;
font-size: 1.2em;
page-break-after: avoid;
page-break-before: avoid;
}Two details there do real work. The letter-spacing is what gives * * * its evenly-spaced look without you typing the spaces. And page-break-before/after: avoid asks the reading system not to split the page right at the marker — a small hedge against the pagination problem the Chicago Manual describes above.
There's one more thing the converter does that you'd otherwise have to remember by hand: the paragraph after a scene break is set flush left, with no indent. By convention — one the Chicago Manual of Style follows — the first paragraph of a new scene opens flush left, exactly like the first paragraph of a chapter. Every other paragraph in the book is indented; the one after a break is not. EbookFormatter tags it automatically, so you don't have to think about it.
Plain asterisks are never wrong. But if you want something with a little more character, EbookFormatter ships six built-in scene-break styles, and applies your choice to every break in the book so they stay perfectly consistent:
| Style | Renders as | Feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Asterisks | * * * | The classic dinkus. Safe everywhere. |
| Floral | ❧ | A fleuron. Warm, literary, romance-friendly. |
| Stars | ✦ ✦ ✦ | Fantasy, YA, anything with a little sparkle. |
| Diamonds | ◆ ◇ ◆ | Clean and modern. |
| Dash | ⸻ | An understated long rule. Minimalist. |
| Asterism | ⁂ | The traditional triangle. Old-school. |
One caution if you go decorative: fancy glyphs depend on the reader's device font. If a particular e-reader's font doesn't include the character, it renders as a "tofu" box (□) instead of the ornament. The built-in styles above are chosen to be widely supported, but it's the reason a plain * * * is the most bulletproof choice, and why an ornament made from a rare Unicode symbol is a gamble. If you need a truly custom flourish that must look identical everywhere, an image is the only guarantee — but images bring their own Kindle problems (see below), so reach for one only when a font glyph genuinely won't do.
Scene breaks are simple, but there are a handful of specific ways they go wrong on Amazon's devices and apps:
Sloppy scene breaks are frequently listed among the most common self-publishing formatting mistakes — Jane Friedman's roundup of self-publishing errors puts formatting problems near the top — and they're entirely avoidable with a visible, consistent marker.
A visible marker helps more than sighted readers. A screen reader can only announce what's actually in the file — and a blank-line "break" is nothing, so it's silent, leaving a listener with no signal that the scene changed. A real marker is content the reader can voice or the listener can perceive, which is one more reason whitespace-only breaks fail: they fail for accessibility too, not just on Kindle. Keeping the same marker throughout also means assistive tech encounters one predictable element rather than a different improvisation in every chapter.
Scene breaks are mostly a fiction device — a shift of time, place, or point of view. Nonfiction leans on subheadings instead, since a labeled heading tells the reader what changed, not just that something did. But the same centered marker is perfectly at home in a memoir, an essay collection, or any narrative nonfiction that moves between scenes. If your prose reads like a story, it can use a dinkus.
Don't confuse the two. A chapter break ends one chapter and starts a new one on a fresh page, usually with a heading; in markdown that's a top-level # heading, and it's also what builds your table of contents. A scene break stays inside a chapter — no new page, no heading, just the centered marker. If the shift is big enough to deserve its own page and title, it's a chapter. If the story simply moves on, it's a scene break. For the full picture of how chapters, front matter, and back matter fit together, see how to structure your manuscript.
The dinkus is the marker that signals a scene break — classically three spaced asterisks (* * *), centered on their own line with space above and below. The older asterism form (⁂) is now nearly obsolete.
* * * or ***?In a markdown manuscript it doesn't matter — ***, * * *, and --- all mark the break and produce an identical, consistently-styled ornament. What the reader sees is set by the ornament style you choose, not by how many asterisks you typed.
No. Ebooks are HTML underneath, and HTML collapses runs of whitespace and empty paragraphs, so blank-line breaks routinely disappear when the file is rendered on a Kindle. Always use a visible marker.
No — by convention it begins flush left with no indent, the same as the first paragraph of a chapter. The Chicago Manual of Style follows this. EbookFormatter applies it to the paragraph after every break automatically.
No. KDP's reflowable text guidelines address indentation, spacing, and chapter/page breaks but not in-chapter scene breaks, and Kindle Create's "section break" is a page break, not a scene break. Scene-break formatting is typographic convention, not an Amazon requirement.
Writing your book? Drop a --- between your scenes, then format your book into a Kindle-ready EPUB in seconds — no account, and every scene break styled consistently. New here? Start with the Formatting Guide or learn converting markdown to EPUB.