Paste your book description exactly as you plan to enter it in Kindle Direct Publishing, HTML tags included. KDP counts the tags toward its 4,000-character limit, so this page does too.
Characters used (tags included)
0/ 4,000
4,000 characters left.
Without spaces
0
Words (tags ignored)
0
Characters in tags
0
HTML check
Paste a description to check its tags.
What readers see first
Amazon shows only the start of a description before a "Read more" link, and the exact cutoff varies by device. This is a rough view of roughly the first 150 characters, with tags removed.
How to check an Amazon KDP book description
Your book description appears on your Amazon detail page and is often a reader's first look at your book. In the KDP editor, the character limit is 4,000, and every character counts, including the angle brackets and letters of HTML tags. A bolded word such as <b>test</b> uses 11 characters, not 4. That is why a description that looks short in a word processor can still run over the limit once formatting is added.
Why formatting tags matter
KDP accepts only a limited set of HTML. If you paste in tags it does not support, they may be stripped or show up as visible code on your product page. Descriptions copied from Word or Google Docs often carry hidden formatting along with them, so it is worth checking the raw text before you submit.
Tips for a clean description
Put your strongest sentence first, since readers see the opening before anything else.
Use line breaks and short paragraphs so the text is easy to scan on a phone.
Remove empty brackets such as <>, which can cause invisible-character problems.
Leave a little room under the limit so a last-minute edit does not push you over.
Need a general word or character count instead? Use the main word counter, or build citations with FastCite.