KDP publishing
KDP listing metadata
KDP asks for a book description and up to seven keywords. The Listing Assistant writes both from your book — a description formatted for Amazon and 20 keyword ideas — for you to review, edit and paste into KDP. Writing them uses none of your pages. The listing generator comes with Creator ($32/month) and higher plans, and with every free trial. ColorCraft’s 7-day trial needs a card.
Before you start
The assistant writes from your book’s title, theme, page count and page size. If the book still has a working title, rename it first: in the editor, click the title in the top bar, type the real one and press Enter.
Write your listing
- 1
Open the Listing Assistant
Click Listing in the top bar of the editor, the cover editor or the mockup studio, or on a book’s card on Home. From the left-hand menu, click Listings and then Write listing next to the book.
- 2
Click Generate KDP Listing
The button shows Generating…, then you’ll see “Listing generated — Description + 20 keywords ready to copy.” It uses none of your pages, and it’s saved to the book straight away.
Your generated listing: description on top, keywords below. - 3
Check the description
The Edit tab shows the description with simple tags such as
<b>for bold and<ul>/<li>for bullet points — KDP’s description box understands them, so leave them in. Click Preview to see roughly how it will look on Amazon.The counter (for example 1,497 / 4,000 · short) tracks the length: under 1,500 characters is short, 1,500–2,500 is ideal, more is long, and over 4,000 is over KDP limit.
Preview: bold and bullets, as Amazon will show them. - 4
Check the keywords
Keywords lists 20 ranked ideas — KDP gives you 7 keyword boxes. In ColorCraft each row holds up to 50 characters and shows its count. KDP’s help pages don’t give a number, so check the counter in KDP’s own boxes when you paste. Click a row to edit it.
20 ranked keyword ideas, each with its character count. - 5
Save your edits
As soon as you change anything, Save edits appears in the top bar. Click it to keep your changes — you’ll see “Saved — Your edits are persisted to the project.”
Save edits appears once you've changed something. - 6
Paste it into KDP
Click the copy button on the Description card (Copy description) and paste into the Description box on KDP’s Paperback Details page. For keywords, copy one row at a time with its copy button, or all 20 at once (Copy all keywords (newline-separated)), and put the best phrases into KDP’s seven keyword boxes.
KDP’s keyword rules
From KDP’s keywords page and metadata guidelines:
- Use up to seven keywords or short phrases; KDP recommends phrases 2–3 words long, in the order a buyer would type them.
- Leave out what’s already in your title, author or contributor names, or categories; quality claims (“best”); time-sensitive words (“new”, “on sale”); brands you don’t own or aren’t authorized to use; Amazon program names such as Kindle Unlimited; and HTML tags.
- Your title and subtitle together must be fewer than 200 characters, and the title can’t mention promotions such as “free”.
Compliance flags and starting over
- If a yellow box says “1 KDP compliance flag” (or more), read each item and edit the description or keywords before you paste them into KDP.
- Regenerate (top bar) writes a fresh listing. If you have unsaved edits it asks first: “Regenerating will discard your unsaved edits. Continue?”
- The line under the keywords shows when the listing was generated.
All your listings in one place
Click Listings in the left-hand menu to see every book’s saved listing. Each book shows its description (click Show more for the rest), its keywords, and three buttons: Copy description, Copy keywords and Edit listing. Books that don’t have one yet are listed under Books without a listing, each with Write listing.
If something goes wrong
- “Could not generate listing” with a reason: click Generate again. Writing a listing needs an active plan or free trial (card required).
- “Creator and up: the listing generator” — your plan doesn't include the listing generator. The listing generator comes with Creator ($32/month) and higher plans, and with every free trial. If you started a trial or paid for a plan before AI covers, mockups and listings moved to Creator, you keep all three on every plan. Your saved listing stays here to edit and copy.
- “Generated, but not saved — We could not persist this listing. Make any edit and click Save to retry.” Change any character, then click Save edits.
- “Could not save”: check your connection and click Save edits again.
- “Could not copy”: select the text yourself and copy it with Cmd/Ctrl + C.
Listing images next
Write a listing
Description and keywords in one click. Review them, then paste them into KDP.
ColorCraft’s 7-day trial needs a card.