Making Your Book Description Look Pretty On Amazon

If you’re pretty new to self-publishing or you’re planning to publish soon, you may not know that you can customize how your book description looks on Amazon.

Compare These Descriptions

Here’s a description of a Vampire Queen Saga boxset (which I haven’t read, I picked this for the typeface) that uses different type sizes, boldface, italics, and paragraph spacing.

This approach highlights the tag lines, italicizes titles, and makes the entire description appear easy to read.

The description below is from an Anne Rice book.

It includes boldface, but the paragraph of description is not broken up at all, making it a little less inviting.

Changing The Appearance Of Your Book Description

You can customize your text in your KDP Dashboard. Choose Edit Book Details for your published book.

In the description box (shown below), you’ll add some codes, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Click Save at the bottom and the next screen until you scroll down to Publish. You’ll need to republish for your changes to appear.

Adding Codes

You don’t need to know coding already or be a programmer or website developer to customize your text.

To see some of the basic codes that can be easily added, I use this blurb preview page. It lists “Allowed Tags,” such as <b>, which turns on boldface, and </b>, which turns off boldface. The <h1>, <h2>, etc., are headers.

For example, the <h4> in my Super Simple Story Structure description above makes the first two lines larger and boldfaced and adds an extra blank line after them. The </h4> turns off the header setting so the next lines are in regular text:

In the blurb previewer, you can type or paste your description into the Input box, experiment with adding codes, and see (roughly) how they will look in the Output box below.

Caveat:

The Output display you’ll see is not always perfectly accurate. After you change your description in the KDP Dashboard, watch for the description to update on the book’s sales page and check it so you can quickly modify it if something doesn’t look quite how you expected.

Experimenting with the codes and how they look is a great way to spend an hour on a gloomy winter day.

Until Friday–

L.M. Lilly

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