Craft a great product page for Apple Books

Product pages on Apple Books give readers valuable insight into books. There’s a lot of content on a product page: a cover, title, subtitle, the book’s description, customer ratings and reviews, information about a book’s series, and of course, the price. All of these elements can make or break a sale, so think of your product page as the best opportunity to gain a new reader.

Design a great cover

Your cover is the single most important way to attract readers to your book, so it’s worth putting a lot of thought and consideration into the design process. Learn more about designing a great digital book cover.

Write a powerful book description

A Publisher Description is one of the most powerful marketing tools on Apple Books. Making your book’s description interesting communicates that the book is worth reading and gets readers excited about the story. Think of the description as your book’s version of a movie trailer: it’s a teaser with the goal of getting the reader intrigued. Make your description substantive. Spend time describing the narrative. Include compelling quotes from great customer reviews. Use text styling like bold or italics where appropriate to make the description look good and set apart paragraphs or different sections of the description. 

Note that a Publisher Description is required, and should accurately represent the book, be formatted correctly, and avoid unnecessary information, such as pricing or other retailer references.

Use best practices for metadata

Fields that appear on product pages are important because they offer the customer a complete picture of your book. Complete these fields by taking a thoughtful, comprehensive approach and strive for accuracy. 

Categories

You’ll need to include at least one category when you submit your book. Provide at least one primary category, and if applicable, a second supporting category to provide a little more subject focus. Adding more than two is not advisable.

Series information

If a book is part of a series, Apple Books displays helpful series information on the product page for customers. This makes it easy for readers to tap and buy all the books in a series after they get excited about Book 1. Make sure to add any series information for your books so that it appears for customers on the store. Include the number of each book in the series such as Book 1, Book 2, etc. Learn more about adding series information.

Screenshots

If your book includes illustrations, photos, or other visual content, adding screenshots on your book’s product page is a powerful way to engage customers. Lots of authors include screenshots even if their book is a traditional novel and is largely text-based, as they contend making their product page more rich with additional media like screenshots serves to make it more engaging. Refer to our formatting guidelines for more information on including screenshots.

Encourage customer ratings and reviews

Reader feedback is a key ingredient in driving sales because it gives a clear signal to prospective customers about the quality of your book. Reading a book is a time commitment, so most customers use ratings and reviews as important reference points when deciding if a particular book is worth their time and money. It can be worthwhile to solicit genuine ratings and reviews from your readers because this sort of engagement benefits other readers as well as you, the author.

Ratings and reviews also factor into a book’s overall popularity on Apple Books. Readers have the ability to leave ratings and reviews the moment your book releases, so once your final book file is delivered into our system, you can distribute free promo codes to reviewers, bloggers, and fans in order to generate more ratings and reviews for launch time. Learn more about how to plan for your book launch.