I discovered an amazing blurb on Amazon. My first thought was, “Wow! How did he do that?” So I asked.

Here is a link to the book that has the incredible blurb:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B7GIVSE

The formatting pops right out at you. Yeah, it’s the formatting that caught my attention – not necessarily the writing that made this an exceptional blurb. The top of the picture showing there compels the customer to click the “Show more” link – something that most customers seldom do. The headings, the color, the cute second picture – it’s visually quite appealing and provides a professional look.

A similarly formatted description can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006V07H6S

So how did these authors do it? Here is the link to the KDP Community Forum thread where I discovered the first author’s book and asked him. Since he revealed his secret, I just had to buy a copy. 🙂

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=540809&#540809

Okay, there is a problem here: The KDP forum responds to HTML, so you can’t type your HTML in the forum without the text of the code converting to formatting.

Find the code for the second description at the link below. Since this link doesn’t go to the KDP Community Forum, you can see the actual code this time. Compare the code to the description.

http://variationspublishing.com/variations/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ofallthewesternstars-productdescription.txt

Also, you have to use the ASCII codes for the less than (<) and greater than (>) signs:

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=544162&#544162

The h1 and h2 tags apparently also affect SEO rankings, as explained here:

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=544619&#544619

I thought this was pretty cool and wanted to share it. But credit the HTML experts who discovered this; all I did was try to organize the information.

Chris McMullen, self-published author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers