In this message, we’ll show you a step-by-step method for writing a description that will get your Kindle book in the hands of readers. (We strongly recommend that you read our article on selecting keywords first as this subject will be discussed in this message.)
Your book’s description is not merely an introduction of your book to potential readers – it is also a field of data used by search engines to recommend books to buyers. Much of the marketing of your book is carried out by Amazon’s powerful search engines that work off whatever information you give them. Thus the description of your book needs to be optimized for both human readers and computers. A good description provides readers with a comprehensive, well-written overview while creating a string of keywords that will grab the attention of search engines.
Kindle allows up to 4,000 words for your book’s description. We suggest using as many as possible and we advise spending a little time thinking about the best possible description for your book. One of the biggest mistakes authors make is not taking advantage of the marketing potential offered by a well-written description.
When a buyer searches for a book on Amazon, the website’s search engine will suggest a variety of books based on the words used in their search. The books suggested by the search engine are based on relevance to the search terms (unless the buyer selects a different setting, such as highest average rating).
Once a buyer begins typing in the search box, Amazon suggests words that are commonly used together as search terms. (These groups of words appear below the search window in a drop-down menu.) In our article on keywords we explain that these combinations of words are the best ones to use as keywords for your book. They are also the ones you want to use in your book’s description because search engines look for these words in the title, subtitle, description, and in the keywords selected for your book. The more often these word combinations are found – the more likely Amazon is to recommend your book when a buyer enters those words in their search.
To begin, log in to the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard for your book and find the description text box as shown below.
We suggest writing your description in a word processing program and when you are finished, copy and paste it into the text window. Using our book Divine Healing Made Simple as our example, the image below shows how we created a compelling headline for the description. Amazon has a new feature for authors who have an author page with them. (Click this link to find out more about author pages.) The author page allows you to create a description in an editing window that provides tools for the formatting of text including bold, underline, bullet lists, and more. If you have an author page, creating a professional-looking description is a snap. If you don’t have an author page, take heart – Kindle allows the limited use of HTML tags for the description in the standard description page editor.
HTML Tags
It’s completely optional, but if you want to create various effects for the text in your description, you can do so by placing HTML tags at the beginning and end of sections of text to create headlines, bold, italics, bullets, and more. To create the headline effect as shown in the example below, use the opening heading tag (<H1>) immediately before your ext and the closing tag (</H1>) immediately after the text.
To create the headline effect for your description, replace the text between the tags below with your own text:
<H1>Your Heading Here</H1>
If you want to put the title of your book in bold as we did below, use the HTML tags (<b> </b>) to do it. Replace the text between the tags below with the title of your book:
<b>Your Title Here</b>
To create blank lines between paragraphs and headings, use the paragraph tags (<p> </p>) at the beginning and end of a section of of text. Below we show how to use paragraph and bold tags together. The formatting for the first paragraph in our description looks like this:
<p>
<b>Divine Healing Made Simple</b> is a training manual for the supernatural life, providing street-proven instruction for healing the sick in any type of setting. In addition to healing, the book teaches about prophetic ministry, street evangelism and making disciples.</p>
While many authors might use as little as 200 words in their entire book description, we used that many just for the opening. We wrote four paragraphs for the opening of our description, each with a different purpose. One paragraph is a general introduction, one tells readers what they can expect from the book, another helps to distinguish our book from others in its genre, and the last is an inspirational paragraph to motivate buyers to read further.
The description itself should be an easy-to-read overview of your book, with a generous sprinkling of key search words strategically placed within the text so that they don’t interfere with the natural reading of the passage. Repetition of keywords is acceptable as long as it doesn’t become glaringly obvious that you’re trying to pack as many search terms as possible into the description. Be careful not to overdo it. Below we’ve circled all the commonly used search terms we used in our description.
Bullet List
To give readers a closer look at the contents of our book, and to provide search engines with more keywords, we included the chapter headings of the book in a bullet list. To create a bullet list, replace the text between the tags below with the words from your book:
<li>Chapter 1</li>
<li>Chapter 2</li>
<li>Chapter 3</li>
<li>Chapter 4</li>
Key Words
The keywords
we want search engines to find in our bullet list are circled below:
Reviews
Once your book has received some positive reviews you may want to consider adding a few of them to the description. We chose short excerpts from the best reviews and created a list of them with each review separated by a line of blank space.
Headline
To create the headline effect as shown below, replace the text between the tags below with your own heading or use ours:
<H1>What Readers Are Saying:</H1>
Italics
It’s completely optional, but to place text in italics as shown below, use the italics tags (<i> </i>) at the beginning and end of the text you want to italicize:
<i>“A book that will bring you to a simpler place and understanding of the truths behind healing the sick.”</i>~ Cameron
Paragraph Tags
To create a line of space between reviews use the paragraph tags (<p> </p>) and the beginning and end of each line of text. Below is an example of how paragraph and italic tags can be used together:
<p>
<i>“A book that will bring you to a simpler place and understanding of the truths behind healing the sick.”</i>~ Cameron</p>
<p>
<i>“The authenticity and pure heart of the author comes shining through in a way I truly appreciate.” </i>~ Kody</p>
Save and Continue
When your description is complete, save it by clicking on either the “save and continue” or the “save as draft” button at the bottom of the page.