Listings

Stage ③ Listings lays your copy into the fields each store actually asks for, with a live meter on every one.

The stores

Amazon KDP · Apple Books · Kobo · Google Play Books · Draft2Digital · IngramSpark · Findaway.

Each has its own set of fields — title, subtitle, description, keywords, categories, and store-specific extras like an author biography or a short pitch.

The meters, and what "approximate" means

Every limit carries a source and a flag.

Only Amazon's 4,000-character description limit is exact. Every other limit in the set is marked approximate, and the meter says so — because most stores do not publish their limits reliably, several are account-dependent, and they change without notice. Amazon moved from two BISAC subjects to three browse categories with no announcement.

A meter reading 2,180 / ~4,000 is telling you the ceiling is our best sourcing, not a promise.

The HTML rule

Amazon counts the markup, not the visible text.

This is the classic "it fit in my editor and the store rejected it" problem: a description with a few paragraph tags and some bold can be hundreds of characters over the limit while looking comfortably short.

The meters count HTML where the store counts HTML, and plain characters where it does not.

Over the limit

A warning, never a block.

You get a red meter and a Fit to limit button you can choose to press. Nothing is ever silently truncated — cutting an author's blurb without asking is not something this product does, and most of these limits are approximate anyway, so hard-blocking on a number flagged as unverified would be dishonest in the other direction.

A+ content copy

The A+ copy lives here — the text you type into Amazon's own A+ editor.

That is different from an A+ plate, which is an image and is composed on the shots canvas.

The distinction is worth keeping: text typed into Amazon's editor stays searchable, and text baked into an image does not. A+ modules therefore default to bare image slots with the words entered separately.

What to watch for

• Check the store's own form as you paste. These limits are our best sourcing, and the store is the authority on its own fields.
• Listings need copy. With nothing written, this stage has nothing to lay out — generate it in Store copy first.
• Keywords are per-item limited, not one long string. The meters count each keyword and the number of them.