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 · Voices by INaudio (formerly Findaway Voices).

Each has its own set of fields — title, subtitle, description, keywords, categories, and store-specific extras like an author biography or a short pitch. A store that has no field for something gets none here: Apple Books and Google Play have no keyword field, so they are not given one.

Categories

Most stores take BISAC subjects, and each store's sheet lists the code next to the heading (for example FIC022060 Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Historical). The first is your primary category. How many a store takes differs: Apple takes two, Google Play, Kobo, IngramSpark and KDP three, Draft2Digital five.

Amazon and Kobo pick from their own lists, not BISAC codes, so there you choose in the store's own category picker. Use the headings as a guide to what to look for.

The meters, and what "approximate" means

Every limit carries a source and a flag.

A limit is exact only where the store's own help pages state it — Amazon's 4,000-character description and its title rule, IngramSpark's byte limits and keyword field, and each store's category count. The rest are marked approximate, and the meter says so — because many stores do not publish their limits, several are account-dependent, and they change without notice. Amazon moved from two BISAC subjects to three categories from its own list 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.

IngramSpark counts bytes, not characters. Most letters are one byte, but an accented letter, a curly quote or a dash is two or three — so a description full of them reaches IngramSpark's 4,000 sooner than the character count suggests. Its meter says "bytes".

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 at most stores: the meters count each keyword and the number of them. IngramSpark is the exception: one field, keywords separated by semicolons, 500 characters in all, and it asks for at least seven.
• Amazon's keyword rules reject your own title or name, words like "bestselling" or "free", Amazon program names (Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading), time-sensitive words ("latest", "new release") and quotation marks. The meter flags each one.
• No prices in a description. Apple and IngramSpark reject a price, a discount or a free offer in it; the meter warns you.
• Amazon's title and subtitle together must be under 200 characters.