What a store actually shows a browsing reader
You fill in the fields once, in a form, with all of them visible at the same time. The reader never sees that form. They see a small picture in a grid of other small pictures, and then, if you were lucky, a page where perhaps a third of what you wrote is on screen before they have to tap.
Store layouts differ from each other and change without warning, so nothing below is a promise about any particular retailer. The pattern is stable enough to design for.
A results grid shows almost nothing
When a reader searches, or browses a category, or scrolls a "customers also bought" strip, what they get for each book is roughly: the cover at a small size, the title, often the author, often a rating, sometimes a price. Not the description. Not the categories or keywords you agonized over — those decided whether you appeared at all, and then stopped working. How readers actually search for books covers who is typing what into that box in the first place.
So the thumbnail carries the entire first decision. Everything else on your listing is only reachable by a reader who already chose to look at you rather than the eleven other books on the same screen, and the cover is what made that choice. This is why The thumbnail test is worth more than any other check in this trade, and why a cover that was designed at full size on a large monitor is not yet finished.
The product page, roughly in order
Tap through and the order is fairly consistent: the cover again at a larger size, the title, the series if there is one, the author, the rating, the price, the format switcher — and then the description, or as much of the description as fits, with the rest folded behind a "read more" control.
That fold is the important part. Most readers never open it. Whatever sits above it is your listing; the rest is for the small number of people already sold who are looking for a reason to be sure.
The first line or two is doing the selling
If you write a description that builds — a paragraph of setting, then a paragraph of situation, then the hook — the hook is behind the fold and nobody reads it. Front-load. Put the thing that makes someone want the book in the first sentence, and treat everything after it as support for a reader who has already decided to keep reading.
How to write a blurb that sells the book covers what those sentences should say. The structural point here is simply where they have to sit.
The series field is how your other books get seen
A series name typed into your title is text. A series name in the series field is a relationship, and stores use it to show the other volumes, order them, and offer the next one at the end of the ebook. Fill it in, number it, and use exactly the same series name on every volume — one stray "The" or a changed capitalization can split a series into two. Series numbering, and getting the books to find each other has the mechanics.
The format switcher is why editions must be linked
The row of format options on a product page — paperback, hardcover, ebook, audiobook — exists because the store knows those are one book. When the link is missing, you have two listings, each with its own reviews and its own readers, and neither one tells anybody the other exists. It is the most expensive quiet fault a listing can have, and it usually happens because the editions were uploaded months apart with a slightly different title or author spelling.
In the Cover Maker. It checks your cover at thumbnail size while you are still designing, so you learn that the title disappears at grid scale before the book is on sale rather than after, and it exports the ebook cover at 1600 × 2560 for the store to show beside the print edition. Start your cover → · about the Cover Maker
Everything long is cut somewhere
Titles, subtitles and series names are truncated at different lengths in different places — shorter in a grid tile than on the product page, shorter again in a recommendation strip, shorter still in an app. You do not control where the cut falls and you cannot find out in advance.
What you control is the length. A title that reads well in eight words reads as a fragment ending in an ellipsis wherever the allowance is six. If a subtitle is carrying real work, make its first few words carry it, because those may be the only ones a reader ever sees. Choosing a title that can be found and remembered goes further into this.
Mobile shows less of every part
Most browsing happens on a phone, and a phone shows a smaller cover, fewer characters of the title, and far less description before the fold. If you check your listing on a desktop browser at a comfortable window width, you are looking at the most generous version of your page that exists, which is not the one your readers get.
Go and look at it wrong on purpose
Do not open your book by typing its name. That takes you straight to the product page and skips the only screen that decides anything.
Instead, on a phone, signed out, search for something a reader would search for — your genre, a comparison title, a phrase from your subject — and find yourself in the grid of results. Look at the thumbnail first and honestly: does it read, does it separate from its neighbors, can you tell what kind of book it is. Then tap through and read only what is above the fold.
Check the listing the way a stranger would is the full field-by-field pass once you are on the page. This one is about getting there the way a reader does.
Make your cover
The Cover Maker is free to use: name your book, bring your artwork, and it draws the full wrap — front, spine and back — to your printer's own measurements. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Check the listing the way a stranger would · More: The thumbnail test · Ebook cover size, and why it is not your print front · The sample, and what it is selling