Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
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Bold in description
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Elizabeth (Alaska)
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Oct 20, 2019 08:05AM
Is there a policy regarding bold face type in descriptions?
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Not as far as I know. I personally might edit to make it look neater but mostly to remove those parts of markup that don't translate from Amazon to Goodreads (e.g. changing h1 to b).In general, bold is fine. Do you have a specific example you're querying?
No, this is a generic question. Personally I find them annoying and serve no useful purpose. I didn't intend to go about editing them. However, if I was doing something else in the description field anyway (like removing review material or extra line spaces), I might, so I thought I'd ask.
Generally, I would edit based on clarity. Some books the bold and italics at the start can help, as can using markup to separate longer contents lists (e.g. sections of anthologies). Without formatting, some descriptions do just blur into Wall-of-Text territory. In general, I wouldn't remove it, but at the same time, unless readability is suffering, I wouldn't go out of my way to put them in.
The ones I'm referring to are using it just to get attention, like a sales gimmick, but not review material..
Hmm, that's harder to be definite about. If it's promotional text, just remove the lot, if not, then I'd say it's best to err on the side of caution and leave it. Alternatively, if you can bring some specific examples forward we could perhaps start to define the borders between clearly promotional, and just being eye-catching (e.g. a lot of the big publishers use bold+italics for the first sentence or so.)
Emy wrote: "just being eye-catching (e.g. a lot of the big publishers use bold+italics for the first sentence or so.)."This. I just wanted to know policy, and you've clarified that publishers can be stupid enough to do this and be within GR policies.
