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Published: Jun 6, 2025 by C.S. Rhymes
Amazon KDP gives you a basic text editor for your book’s blurb, but here are five observations that I have made from researching other books. All of the examples are taken from Mystery books in the Amazon UK store.
1. Use bold text
Use bold text in your description to highlight important hooks or tropes to catch the readers attention. Highlighting words or lines helps them stand out from paragraphs of blurb text.
You want to ensure that there is a good mix of plain text and bold text. Use too much bold and nothing stands out!
None of this is true by Lisa Jewell
2. Keep those paragraphs short
Break up your blurb into shorter paragraphs to make them easier to read and digest.
See what I did there…
Just like this example, which also uses short, punchy sentences too.
The Waiting by Michael Connelly
3. Use stars alongside text
Use stars * alongside bold text to help separate sections of your blurb. You don’t have the ability to add heading tags higher than h4 in the KDP editor, so you can be a bit creative with the other tools you do have access to.
For example, you could do something like the following to separate the blurb from some reviews.
***Readers loved this book!***
It should have been you by Andrea Mara
4. Highlight character names
Highlight main character names in bold when introducing them. To me, this will grab my attention if I’ve read previous books in the series and already know the characters, but it will also work great for new series, helping to introduce the new characters!
We solve murders by Richard Osman
5. End on a question
Ending on a question leaves the reader only one choice. If they want to know the answer then they need to buy the book!
None of this is true by Lisa Jewell
Trying it out
I have been through the blurbs for my cozy mystery series, The Little-Astwick Mysteries, and rewritten them to try out these techniques. I plan to write a follow up blog post in the future to let you know if there was any immediate impact.
If you have any blurb writing tactics that worked for you, please share them in the comments!
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on StockSnap
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