Your description (AKA your marketing description or blurb) is the copy that describes your book to potential readers. In print, the description appears on the back of the book or on the inside flap of the jacket. With digital, the description appears on the book’s product page on each online retailer.
Unlike a summary, which gives away your book’s entire plot, or a query letter, which pitches your premise to agents, your description targets your readers, and gives away just enough information to compel them to buy and read your book.
The description can also be used to share the accolades and recognition your book has received. You can include quotes from favorable reviews, mention awards your book has won, or advertise your bestseller status (if it’s true!). If you’d like to share an author bio, you can add it at the end of your description.
Highlight or double-click the text you’d like to format to open the style toolbar. From there, you can bold, italicize, and create bulleted or numbered lists.
To meet retailer guidelines, please don’t include any of the following in your book description:
Additionally, your description cannot be in all bold and/or all italics.
Sometimes when authors copy and paste descriptions into our text box, hidden HTML styling elements get transferred over. As a result, even if the description appears to be fewer than 4,000 characters, the rich text formatting carried over makes the description longer.
To avoid this issue, we recommend writing your description directly into the online text box, or copying and pasting your description into a text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit) to remove unwanted hidden styling before pasting into the online text box.