Preparing KDP Metadata

The KDP metadata editor is where you prepare everything Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing asks for at upload time — title, description, discoverability fields, series position, and print specs — and copy each field out cleanly. It is organized into five tabs, and every field is saved into your book’s book.json so it stays in your transparent project folder alongside the manuscript.

Opening the editor

The editor works on the currently open book. As you type, the form holds your changes locally; nothing is written to disk until you click Save All Changes at the bottom. The save button persists every tab at once, so you can move between tabs freely before saving.

The five tabs

Basic

The Basic tab covers the core bibliographic fields:

• Title (required) — must match exactly what appears on your cover.
• Subtitle — optional.
• Author and Publisher.
• Language — chosen from English, English (US), English (UK), Spanish, French, German, Italian, or Portuguese.
• Target Audience — Adult (18+), Young Adult, or Children. (Audience also surfaces in the Discovery workflow.)
• ISBN — optional for eBooks, required for print. Placeholder format 978-0-00-000000-0.
• ASIN — assigned by Amazon after publishing, so you usually leave this blank until your book is live.

Description

This tab holds your book’s marketing description. Write it in lightweight Markdown — the editor supports **bold**, *italic*, bullet lists, and line breaks. Two things help you stay within KDP’s limits:

• A live character counter shows your plain-text length against the 4000-character maximum and flags you when you go over.
• A KDP HTML Preview renders exactly how the description will look, and the copy button gives you the KDP-allowed HTML (only b, i, u, br, h4-h6, ul, ol, li, and p tags are produced).

You can also record Content Warnings here as a simple list — add as many rows as you need, and empty rows are dropped on save.

Series

If the book belongs to a series, this tab shows the shared series fields (name, tagline, description, total volumes) as read-only, because they are owned by the series file, not the book. The one field you edit here is Position in Series — this book’s number within the series (for example 1 for Book 1).

Series details themselves live in series/<slug>.json and are edited from the dashboard Series panel so the change applies to every book in the series. If the book is not yet part of a series, the tab explains how to attach it by setting seriesSlug and seriesPosition in book.json. See working with series for the full workflow.

Discovery

This tab covers the two fields that drive findability on Amazon:

• Keywords — up to 7, each a maximum of 50 characters. Type a keyword and press Enter (or the add button) to create a chip; remove a chip with its ✕. The editor validates each keyword and warns you about promotional terms KDP discourages — words like free, best, bestseller, cheap, sale, gift, book, ebook, or kindle are flagged as forbidden.
• Categories — up to 3 BISAC categories, chosen from a curated list. Each category can only be added once.

Specs

The Specs tab captures sizing and print details:

• Est. Word Count and Est. Page Count for your own planning.
• Print Specifications:
  • Interior — Black & White, Standard Color, or Premium Color.
  • Trim Size — one of 5×8, 5.25×8, 5.5×8.5, 6×9, 7×10, or 8.5×11 inches.
  • Paper — White or Cream.

Copy for KDP

Almost every field has a small copy button beside its label. Clicking it copies a KDP-ready version of that field to your clipboard, and the button briefly shows a checkmark to confirm. The copied value is normalized for KDP rather than handed over raw:

• Description is converted to KDP-allowed HTML and truncated at a word boundary if it would exceed 4000 characters.
• Keywords are trimmed, capped at 50 characters each, and limited to the first 7, joined with commas.
• Series number resolves from either the series data or the book’s position.

This lets you fill out KDP’s web form field-by-field by copying from the editor and pasting into Amazon, without re-typing or worrying about formatting that KDP would reject.

Where it is stored

Saving writes your metadata back into the book’s book.json in the project folder. Because it is a plain JSON file, your metadata is versioned, diffable, and portable — see the file-first philosophy for why that matters. Metadata changes are also snapshotted; see version history.