How To Use HTML For Amazon Book Descriptions To Stand Out

Hidden deep in Amazon’s KDP help section is a page titled, Supported HTML for Amazon book descriptions.

It might not sound very exciting, and for those who have no idea about HTML, perhaps a bit daunting.

But it is extremely useful and offers a very simple means of making your book descriptions stand out and attract attention.

For those unfamiliar with HTML, it is a code or tag that can be used to enhance text characteristics.

It’s very easy to do

Don’t panic, though, as I will show you below how easy it is to enhance your Amazon book description.

One note first. This will only work when you modify your book description from your KDP dashboard. Select your book, and go to your book details page.

Note that this method will NOT work if you edit your book description in Author Central.

You can certainly use HTML for Amazon book descriptions in Author Central edits. But you need a little more knowledge of HTML than is covered in this article.

A better-looking book description in less than five minutes

It’s quite easy to make your description more attractive to a potential reader.

You want people to buy your book, so anything you can do to make your book’s sales page more appealing is worthwhile.

So let’s get started.

Add a few HTML tags, and see the difference it makes

I am going to take a bland book description and add a new attention-grabbing headline. Then I’ll italicize a few reviews quotes, and make the last line a bold attention grabber simply by adding some HTML tags.

<h2>When it comes to love, it’s never too late …</h2>

<i>..anticipated a sad story of death….but just the opposite…</i>

<i>I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In fact, I hated to see it end.</i>

<i>Wow, some people have the ability to make you feel the story through their words.</i>

Life has the habit of delivering its twists at the most unexpected times.

For Bonnie, his life had been lived, and the bittersweet memories of his wife, along with the never-ending sorrow of losing his son so young remain with him, but they were now ebbing away slowly with the passing of the years. His days of love, warmth, and tenderness well past and all that was left were his last few quiet years to grow old. Alone, yet content.

What he had done, he had done and what had happened, had. All that remained was to live out the rest of his life in a new place, far away from his checkered past. His days passing with the regularity that an old man desires and deserves. Until the dark day arrives that signals an impending end to his newfound life, and with it, all sense of hope.

In facing mortality, Bonnie resorts to using his crusty exterior and bravado to hide the frailty and fear he feels within himself – until he is presented with stark realities beyond his understanding and is forced to come face to face with his own prejudices and beliefs.

In meeting Danny and Angeline, Bonnie begins to reshape his thoughts about his acceptance of those he had habitually admonished, and of the bigoted life he has lived. While Charlie and his daughter Beatrice realign his set concepts of how he had habitually rushed to judge people too quickly.

However, it is only when Bonnie meets Madeleine that the most unexpected eventuality turns his hard-held beliefs, and his very set views about life, people, and love, on their head.

<b>Read One Last Love, only if you are looking for a very different, yet very touching romance story.</b>

You can see the code I have added at the beginning and end of the lines of text I want to modify. <b> makes a line of bold text. <i> makes a line italic. <h2> was a surprise, because it makes a line extra bold.

The most important part here, and what Amazon does not explain in their HTML page is that you MUST close these tags correctly.

You can see from my example above that I open a line with <b> and then at the end I added a forward slash. </b>.

If you don’t add this forward slash, it won’t work.

If you want to modify your book description, you can simply copy and paste the codes from my example above.

The result?

What did these small HTML tags do?

Here is the result below of my book on Amazon. Or better still, you can go to my book page to see the actual result online.

When it comes to love, it’s never too late …

..anticipated a sad story of death….but just the opposite…

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In fact, I hated to see it end.

Wow, some people have the ability to make you feel the story through their words.

Life has the habit of delivering its twists at the most unexpected times.

For Bonnie, his life had been lived, and the bittersweet memories of his wife, along with the never-ending sorrow of losing his son so young remain with him, but they were now ebbing away slowly with the passing of the years. His days of love, warmth, and tenderness well past and all that was left were his last few quiet years to grow old. Alone, yet content.

What he had done, he had done and what had happened, had. All that remained was to live out the rest of his life in a new place, far away from his checkered past. His days passing with the regularity that an old man desires and deserves. Until the dark day arrives that signals an impending end to his newfound life, and with it, all sense of hope.

In facing mortality, Bonnie resorts to using his crusty exterior and bravado to hide the frailty and fear he feels within himself – until he is presented with stark realities beyond his understanding and is forced to come face to face with his own prejudices and beliefs.

In meeting Danny and Angeline, Bonnie begins to reshape his thoughts about his acceptance of those he had habitually admonished, and of the bigoted life he has lived. While Charlie and his daughter Beatrice realign his set concepts of how he had habitually rushed to judge people too quickly.

However, it is only when Bonnie meets Madeleine that the most unexpected eventuality turns his hard-held beliefs, and his very set views about life, people, and love, on their head.

Read One Last Love, only if you are looking for a different, yet very touching romance story.

Lastly, I would recommend that you edit your book description in a text editor. Don’t do it directly online in your KDP dashboard.

Copy your book description, paste it into a plain text editor, and make your changes. Then copy and paste it back into your book details on KDP and republish.

If you make a mistake or something is amiss, don’t worry. Just wait for your book to become live (usually only 6-12 hours) and try again.

Once you get the idea of how to use these HTML tags, it only takes a few minutes to make your book descriptions stand out from the crowd and help attract book buyers’ attention.

Is there an easier way?

Yes, there is.

If manually adding HTML for Amazon book descriptions is not for you, you can use a WYSIWYG text editor.

All you need to use is the free Amazon book description generator tool from Kindlepreneur.

Related Reading: How To Write Author Bios And Book Descriptions With AI