How to Create a Premium Book Description on Amazon

Add some style

How Do You Make Your Book Description Stand Out on Amazon?

Using a few simple tricks will help your book descriptions look like they were created by a major publishing company. And that will help you sell more books.

Besides your book cover and your book’s ratings, the description is the most important sales tool you have. So how do mortal authors like you and I get beautiful looking book
descriptions?

It’s actually pretty easy. All you have to do is use a bit of html code.

But before I show you the code, I want to be sure you know the risks!

Amazon does allow some HTML use in book descriptions. They recently changed what they support, but as of right now, these codes are supported.

Also, modifying your book description, whether for Kindle or Createspace, will cause your book to go back into review for 12 – 24 hours.

This is where the risk is – if your HTML or book description have an error – a spelling error, an HTML error, whatever – it will take another 12 hours or more before your modifications go live. In other words, your mistake will be live in front of the world for at least 12 – 24 hours until you have fixed, submitted, and gotten approval for modifying the description again.

It’s not a huge risk though and it is more than offset by having a better book description.

The best HTML codes to use with Amazon:

1. Use the <h2> (heading 2) tag to highlight headings in your text. I like to start my book description off with a heading formatted with the <h2> tag. There is support for other heading styles like <h1> and <h3>. However, <h2> is the one I recommend. If you need another heading style, choose <h3>. The <h1> style is simply too big to use in book descriptions.

2. Use bullets points <ul><li>item</li></ul>

3. Use underline and/or bold to highlight certain words or phrases. <u>underline</u> or <b>bold</b>

Here is an example description from one of my books on Amazon Kindle.
book_description

Here’s an example…

In the example above, the title “Discover the Secrets to Selecting and Raising an English Bulldog Puppy” is formatted with the <h2> tag. In my book description that I uploaded it looked like this:

<h2>Discover the Secrets to Selecting and Raising an English Bulldog Puppy</h2>

Then, I later used underlines to bring attention to key information. In my book description, the underline looks like this:

<u>The history of the English bulldog breed</u> – this will help you understand why the bulldog face looks the way it does.

Write your book description in Notepad or TextEdit first so you can more easily see and edit it. Then paste it into the book description area for your book in KDP (or Createspace).

Make sure you check that all your HTML tags are structured the right way. HTML codes are enclosed in greather than and less than signs like <h2>. After the heading text, you should close your heading tag with a slash in the code: </h2>.

That’s all there is to it!

 

<Photo credit: to Danny Howard on Flickr>