Check the length of your blurb, synopsis or pitch

Paste your text to count its words and characters against the length you are aiming for: a back-cover blurb, a KDP book description, a one-page synopsis or an elevator pitch. Change the target to match the guidelines you were given.

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Check your text

Usual: 150 to 200 words. Common guidance for the back of a paperback: enough to set up the story and fit the cover.

Paste or type your text to count it.

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The usual lengths

The same text against every target, with any range you changed above. These are common starting points, not rules: an agent's, publisher's or contest's own guidelines come first.

TargetLengthYour text
Back-cover blurb150 to 200 words0 wordsNothing yet
KDP book descriptionUp to 4,000 characters0 charactersNothing yet
One-page synopsis500 to 700 words0 wordsNothing yet
Elevator pitch25 to 50 words0 wordsNothing yet
  • Back-cover blurb. Common guidance for the back of a paperback: enough to set up the story and fit the cover.
  • KDP book description. Amazon’s limit for the description box. It is a ceiling, not a target, and formatting tags may count toward it.
  • One-page synopsis. About what fits on one single-spaced page. Agents who ask for a synopsis often say how long.
  • Elevator pitch. One to three sentences you can say aloud in about 20 seconds.

The KDP limit is from KDP Help, Edit Book Details, last read on November 4, 2026. The other lengths are general publishing guidance.

How it counts

  • Words are runs of letters or numbers. A hyphenated word such as “well-known”, a contraction such as “don’t” and a number such as “1,000” count as one, as most word processors count them.
  • Characters include spaces and punctuation, and an emoji or an accented letter counts as one. The count without spaces is beside it, for forms that ask for that instead.
  • Sentences and paragraphs are rough: a sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and a blank line starts a new paragraph.

In Author Sweets

Keep the blurb, the synopsis and the pitch in notes beside your book, next to its characters and places. Publishing on Amazon? The KDP keyword helper checks your seven keywords.

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