Description formatting is limited
Amazon accepts a small set of HTML tags and counts markup against the 4000 character limit.
Last reviewed
Why formatting is limited
Amazon's product pages render book descriptions with a small set of HTML tags: bold, italic, headings, lists and line breaks. Anything else is removed or, worse, shown to shoppers as raw markup. Fonts, colours, sizes and tables are not available, whatever your writing tool shows.
The 4000-character limit counts the markup as well as the words. A description that leans heavily on bold and lists has less room for text.
The paste problem
Copying from Word or Google Docs brings hidden styling along: spans, inline styles, smart-quote entities and non-breaking spaces. Pasted into a plain HTML box, it either disappears or turns into visible junk. Writing the description in a plain editor, or in one that only produces the accepted tags, avoids it.
Using the tags well
Formatting earns its place when it helps someone skim on a phone:
- One bold line at the top as a hook, not bold paragraphs.
- A short bulleted list for what a reader gets from a non-fiction book.
- Line breaks between short paragraphs rather than one block of text.
- Headings sparingly, if at all; they are large on a product page.
The editor in this app
The description editor only produces the accepted tags, strips anything else on paste, counts characters including markup, and shows a preview of how the description will read on a product page.
Characters, not words
The limit is counted in characters, and every tag counts: a bold phrase spends seven characters on its opening and closing tags before a word is written. In practice 4000 characters is several hundred words, which is more than most descriptions should use. Treat the limit as a ceiling rather than a target; the first few lines matter far more than the last few hundred characters.
If you use the same description for a paperback, a hardcover and an eBook, write it once in the restricted set of tags and reuse it. Descriptions written in a rich editor for one format and pasted into another are where stray formatting usually creeps in.
What to do
- Pasting from a word processor brings styling that Amazon strips or displays as raw markup.
- Tags themselves consume characters, so heavy formatting shortens how much you can say.
- The description editor keeps output inside the accepted set and shows the live count.
Write a description — the tool in this app that settles it.