The Amazon Books’ blurb is the author’s lure to attract readers. If a reader is drawn to “Look Inside,” and the opening is dynamite, it may set the hook, and the reader will buy the book. (I don’t know why I’m using fishing terminology—I haven’t fished for 50 years.)
Authors may have noticed that the Book Details (blurb) presented next to their book lost most of its formatting. This can be fixed.
The solution is KDP built-in HTML code that allows for formatting Book Details. HTML is the basic glue for web pages, although more powerful programming languages drive websites. You don’t have to be a programmer to use simple HTML tags.
Most HTML commands, called tags, have a beginning and an end, always in the same form. Bold print is signaled this way: <b> The less than sign tells the web browser to get ready for a command, the b stands for bold, and the greater than sign tells the browser the command has ended. From <b> on, all print will be bold. To return to regular text, the tag looks like this: </b> The slash before the command lets the browser know to turn off bold print.
A bold sentence would look like this: <b>This Title is Bold</b>, and this is not bold.
If you reference the title of your book, Italics are in order. <i>Members of the Cast</i> will accomplish the task.
How To Do It
Go to your KDP account and choose Book Details. Scroll down to find your description. Do not try to type the HTML tags in your text. Instead, click Source and work there. Clicking Source again will let you see the results.
Now you have “become an HTML programmer” and can work on your blurb. *smile* Amazon allows bullet lists and font size changes. The following page describes the tags KDP allows: HTML Stuff
The next may seem needlessly complicated, for your Book Details, it is important.
You may notice that <p> begins a paragraph and </p> ends the paragraph with a line break. A simple <br> (with no end tag) is like hitting the Enter/Return key. The difference between the two is simple. <br> starts a new line. The <p> </p> starts and contains a new paragraph. The paragraph tag will skip a line after each paragraph, just as this article has each paragraph in a separate block.
When writing poem lines in my Book Details, I use <br> because most poetry does not have an extra line between each line. <br> has no end tag because it inserts a line break. The code is in red in these examples, and the results are in blue.
<p><b>Liquid Ambers</b></p>
They were planted<br>
The year I was born<br>
And we grew there together.
Looks like this:
Liquid Ambers
They were planted
The year I was born
And we grew there together
Using the paragraph tags,
<p><b>Liquid Ambers</b></p>
<p>They were planted</p>
<p>The year I was born</p>
and we grew there together.</p>
yields this:
Liquid Ambers
They were planted
The year I was born
And we grew there together.
If you visit the #LineByLineTime page at this website, I often quote passages in blue, and don’t use paragraphs ( <p> </p> ), so the print appears more book-like. WordPress has a “Verse” button when inserting a new block. Verse will perform the same trick I am coded manually for Book Details.
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