A+ Content vs Premium A+ Content: What Authors Can Actually Get

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

Every few months an author emails us asking how to unlock Premium A+ Content for their book. They have seen a competitor’s listing with a video, a set of interactive hotspots, a full-bleed image that runs edge to edge, and they want to know what it costs and how long the application takes.

The honest answer is that there is no application, there is no fee, and for most self-published authors there is also no route in. Not because the bar is high, but because the specific thing Amazon asks you to do first cannot be done inside the tool KDP gives you.

We should say plainly that we sell A+ Content design (from £89 at /a-plus/), so we have a commercial reason to make A+ sound important. That is exactly why this article spends most of its length telling you which tier you can actually reach and where the extra spend does not pay. If the conclusion were “buy Premium design from us”, we would be selling something we cannot deliver to a KDP account.

This is not a set-up tutorial. If you want the step-by-step of building and submitting A+ Content on a KDP book, that is covered in Amazon A+ Content for KDP: How to Set It Up. This article is about the tiers, the eligibility rules as Amazon states them today, and whether chasing the top tier is worth an hour of your time.

Three things called A+ Content, not two

Most articles frame this as Basic versus Premium. Amazon’s own seller page frames it as three products. On sell.amazon.com/tools/a-content, fetched 6 August 2026, Amazon describes:

• Basic — “Elevate your product descriptions and highlight key features with images, customized text placements, and shoppable product-comparison charts.”
• Premium — “Build more engaging and informative product listings by adding larger images, videos, interactive hotspots that allow customers to hone in on product features, clickable image or video carousels, Q&A modules, and shoppable content.”
• Brand Story — “Share your brand’s story, values, and mission across all your product listings and drive traffic to your Amazon Brand Store.”

Brand Story is billed as the least interesting of the three. It is in fact the gate. Nothing about Premium makes sense until you know that, and it is the one module a KDP account cannot produce.

There is also a fourth thing that nobody counts: the A+ Content a KDP author gets. It is not Basic A+ Content in Seller Central. It is a separate, reduced tool inside KDP with its own help pages, its own module set and its own guidelines. Conflating it with Basic A+ is where most of the confusion starts.

What each tier actually gives you

Sources: Amazon’s KDP help pages for A+ Content, A+ Content Examples and A+ Content Guidelines, and Amazon’s A+ Content design guide and A+ Content tools page. All fetched 6 August 2026.

The gap that most authors care about is video. A book trailer, a piece to camera, thirty seconds of you explaining who the book is for — that sits in Premium and nowhere else. KDP’s A+ help page makes no mention of video support at all, and its guidelines prohibit animated images including GIFs. There is no workaround inside KDP.

The Premium eligibility gate, in Amazon’s current words

Amazon’s detailed eligibility page sits behind a Seller Central login, so I could not fetch it directly today. What I could reach are two Amazon-owned sources.

The first is Amazon’s own announcement in the Seller Forums, Update to Premium A+ Content eligibility requirements (fetched 6 August 2026), which sets out two conditions:

1. “Brand Story module published on all of your brand-owned product listings”
2. “Five approved A+ Content modules in the last 12 months”

The second, and more useful because it is recent, is an Amazon staff reply in the thread Is Premium A+ content now available for all brand registered sellers?. Amazon’s forums display relative timestamps only: fetched 6 August 2026, the thread reads “updated 3 months ago” and the reply from TaylorR_Amazon reads “2 months ago”, which places it in roughly June 2026. Amazon publishes no calendar date on the page, and I am not going to invent one. The reply states: “TLDR: yes, you will still need those 5 approved Basic A+ content submissions. That requirement has not been removed.” It lists three criteria — publish A+ Brand Story to all owned ASINs in the catalogue, five or more approved A+ project submissions published within the past 12 months, and adherence to Amazon’s content guidelines — and confirms that once they are met, “you don’t need to apply or contact anyone. You’ll see a banner notification confirming your access.”

A lot of 2026 blog posts claim Premium is now switched on by default for every brand-registered seller. Amazon’s own moderator says it is not.

Amazon’s original announcement of the free promotion, Brands: New Premium A+ content promotion (posted by the News_Amazon account; the forum shows only “4 years ago” as of 6 August 2026, and contemporaneous trade coverage dates it to August 2022), carries two details that still matter.

The threshold used to be fifteen. That announcement reads: “If you have published A+ brand story across your ASIN catalog and have had at least 15 A+ content projects approved in the past 12 months, for each Amazon store, you are eligible for Premium A+ content.” It is now five. That is why you will find both numbers quoted confidently across the web — one of them is out of date.

Premium is also free for now, framed as a promotion: “Sellers who have registered as a Brand Owner with Amazon Brand Registry are now eligible for Premium A+ content at no cost for an extended promotional period,” followed by “If we announce a fee for Premium A+ content we will invite you to opt in.” No end date has been published. Treat “free” as current policy rather than a permanent property.

Access is granted automatically. There is no application form. The same announcement says access “is granted at the end of each month” and that a banner appears in A+ Content Manager once you qualify.

Why the gate is a closed loop for a KDP-only author

Read requirement one again: a Brand Story module published on all of your brand-owned product listings.

Now look at what KDP’s A+ Content Manager offers. Amazon’s own A+ Content Examples page for KDP opens by stating: “When you create A+ Content, you can choose between 17 modules to design your detail page layout. You can use up to five modules per detail page layout.” The page names thirteen of those seventeen modules on the page itself:

• Standard Image & Light Text Overlay
• Standard Image & Dark Text Overlay
• Standard Image & Text Overlay
• Standard Single Image & Sidebar
• Standard Image Header With Text
• Standard Single Left Image Module
• Standard Single Right Image Module
• Standard Three Images and Text Module
• Standard Multiple Image Module A
• Standard Technical Specifications Module
• Standard Product Description Text
• Standard Text Module
• Comparison Chart Module

None of the thirteen is Brand Story, and none of KDP’s A+ help pages mentions Brand Story anywhere — the string “Brand Story” does not appear on any of them. The four modules the page does not name individually cannot be checked from outside, but Amazon’s KDP guidelines never reference a Brand Story module, so there is no reason to think one is hiding among them. You cannot publish a thing the tool does not contain.

So the loop closes: Premium requires Brand Story on every brand-owned listing → Brand Story lives in Seller Central’s A+ Content Manager → Seller Central A+ Content requires a Professional selling plan and Brand Registry → Brand Registry requires a trademark. A KDP account gets you none of that.

If your books are published through KDP and you have no trademark, no Brand Registry enrolment and no Professional selling account, Premium A+ Content is not difficult to obtain. It is unavailable. Nothing you do inside KDP moves you towards it, so the research time is better spent on the layout you can actually build.

The only real route in, and what it costs

There is a route. It is a business decision, not a formatting decision.

Amazon’s Brand Registry requirements page states that to enrol, “your brand must have an active registered trademark or a pending trademark registration. That trademark must be a text-based mark (word mark) or an image-based mark with words, letters, or numbers (design mark) from approved government intellectual property (IP) offices.” A pending application filed through Amazon’s IP Accelerator also qualifies, which is Amazon’s way of shortening the wait.

Amazon’s A+ tools page adds the other half: you need a Professional selling account plus Brand Registry enrolment with the right role assigned (or generic products in your catalogue) before Basic A+ and Brand Story are available at all.

Here is what that stack costs, verified against the primary sources today:

Currency conversions are indicative only and move daily — check the rate on the day if the number matters to your decision.

Add it up for a UK author: roughly £205 up front, three to four months of waiting, then £25 a month excluding VAT indefinitely, then publish Brand Story across every listing your brand owns, then get five separate A+ projects approved over the following twelve months. Call it a year and around £500 in fees before the Premium banner appears, and that is assuming your trademark application is not opposed.

And you still are not done, because selling your own books through Seller Central rather than publishing them through KDP is a different business: your own inventory or your own print supply, your own fulfilment or FBA fees, your own returns. Some author-publishers do run this way. If you are a novelist with four titles, it is a large amount of machinery to acquire in order to unlock a video module.

The Brand Story requirement also says “on all of your brand-owned product listings” — every ASIN in the catalogue, not just the one you want to promote. Sellers in that Amazon forum thread pushed back on exactly this point, noting it penalises anyone with a large catalogue. If you have twenty-two titles across paperback, hardback and Kindle, that is a lot of ASINs each needing Brand Story published before any of them can have Premium.

Is Premium actually worth chasing? The evidence is thinner than the marketing

Amazon’s own tools page carries two numbers: Basic A+ Content “can increase sales by up to 8%” and Premium A+ Content “can increase sales by up to 20%”. Both carry footnote 1, which attributes them to Amazon internal data.

These two figures are recycled across hundreds of agency blogs as though they were independent findings. They are not. They are Amazon’s own marketing claims for Amazon’s own products, sourced to unpublished internal data, phrased as “up to”, with no sample, no category breakdown, no time period and no methodology. The 2022 forum announcement drops the hedge altogether and says flatly, “Implementing Premium A+ content can increase your sales by 20%” — the same unpublished number, differently punctuated. They may well be directionally right. They are not evidence you can plan a budget against, and no vendor quoting them to you — including us — has seen the underlying study.

They also cover every product category on Amazon. Books behave differently from kitchen appliances. A hotspot module explaining the torque settings on a cordless drill does real work. A hotspot module on a literary novel has considerably less to explain.

My honest read, from managing Amazon listings on the retail side as well as the publishing side: the biggest jump for a book listing is going from no A+ Content to any A+ Content, because it replaces a wall of description text with a designed, scannable block that survives the mobile viewport. The jump from a well-built Basic layout to a Premium layout is real but much smaller, and on a book it is smaller again. If you are choosing where to put your next £150, a clear Basic A+ layout plus better keyword targeting will almost always beat a video module you cannot legally obtain anyway.

What to do instead, tier by tier

If you publish through KDP (most readers)

Build the best possible KDP A+ Content and stop thinking about Premium. Amazon’s guidelines constrain you more than most people realise, and working within them well is where the gains are. From the KDP A+ Content Guidelines:

• Images must be JPG or PNG, RGB colourspace, “under 2 MB”, at least 72 dpi. No animated images.
• “Images and text must be unique to A+” — do not recycle what is already in your listing image gallery.
• “A maximum of four quotes or endorsements is allowed,” from well-known publications or public figures, with the source named.
• Banned: “Pricing, promotional details or discounts, promotion references such as ‘affordable,’ ‘bonus,’ ‘free,’” and “Language directing customers to purchase such as ‘buy now,’ ‘add to cart’”. Also banned: customer reviews, guarantee or refund information, competitor comparisons, and links off Amazon.
• Blurry images and small text unreadable on mobile will be rejected.

The two mistakes I see most often are both fixable in an afternoon. First, text set at a size that is legible on a laptop and illegible on a phone — the majority of your traffic. Second, a series author who never uses the Comparison Chart Module, which is the best-performing module for backlist because it turns one book’s page into a shop window for six.

Content can also cover several formats at once, which is free reach most authors leave on the table. KDP’s help page: “You can create one A+ Content project and apply multiple book ASINs to it, to add A+ Content to different format detail pages.” Paperback, hardback and Kindle in one submission, and you wait once for the eight-business-day review.

If you want a second opinion on whether your listing is ready before you spend anything, our free KDP readiness audit checks the listing-side fundamentals and costs nothing.

If you already sell through Seller Central with a registered brand

You are the reader for whom Premium is a real question, and the answer is probably yes — because it is free and you are most of the way there. The sequence is: publish Brand Story across every brand-owned ASIN, then get five A+ projects approved over the next twelve months. Both steps cost time rather than money.

Do not batch all five submissions in one week hoping to accelerate the clock. The requirement is five approved projects across twelve months, rejected submissions do not count, and access is only granted at month end — so a sloppy submission costs you a month, not a day.

If you are a small press or an author with a trademarked imprint

You are the borderline case. If you already hold a word mark on your imprint name and you already run a Professional selling account for direct sales, the Premium route is a matter of admin rather than investment. If you hold neither, the calculation is whether you want to become an Amazon seller, and A+ Content should be about fifth on the list of reasons.

A straight decision table

If you are traditionally published, you do not control the detail page and cannot add A+ Content to it. What you can do is ask your publisher whether they have built any, because a surprising number of mid-list titles have an empty “From the Publisher” section that nobody has ever filled in.

Where DIY beats paying anybody, including us

We charge £89 for a three-panel A+ Essentials build and £149 for five panels. There are authors who should not pay that.

If you have a good eye, Canva, and your cover designer’s source files, you can produce a competent three-panel KDP A+ layout in an afternoon. The templates are fixed, the image specs are published, and the guidelines above are the whole rulebook. Fiverr is cheaper again and, for a single simple layout, will often do a perfectly adequate job — we are not affiliates of anyone, so there is no reason for us to pretend otherwise. (Fiverr pricing is seller-set and moves constantly, so we are not quoting a figure that would be stale within weeks.)

Where paid design earns its keep is at volume and at consistency: a six-book series that needs one visual system applied across every listing, or a non-fiction title where the comparison chart and the credibility panel are doing real conversion work. That is why our multi-book packs exist (£349 for three, £499 for five, £799 for ten — roughly £116, £100 and £80 a book). One book, one layout, decent design instincts? Do it yourself and put the £89 into ads.

And if your listing has no A+ Content at all and your interior is also a mess, the interior is the more consequential of the two — formatting starts at £69 at /format/, and no amount of A+ design rescues a book that falls apart on page three.

What I could not verify, and why I am telling you

Three things, stated plainly rather than guessed at:

The exact current wording of Amazon’s Premium eligibility help page. It sits behind a Seller Central login. My sources are Amazon’s own forum announcements and the recent Amazon staff reply quoted above. If you have a Seller Central account, check A+ Content Manager directly — Amazon’s own guidance is that eligibility shows as a banner there.

A calendar date for the Amazon staff reply. Amazon’s Seller Forums render relative timestamps only. Checked on 6 August 2026, that thread showed “updated 3 months ago” and the moderator’s reply showed “2 months ago” — around June 2026. I have quoted what the page displays rather than converting a relative timestamp into a false precision. If Amazon adds absolute dates, this paragraph gets updated.

Any independent, dated sales-uplift study for A+ Content on books. I did not find one. Every percentage in circulation traces back to Amazon’s own “up to 8%” and “up to 20%” claims or to agency case studies with no published methodology. If someone quotes you a precise uplift figure for A+ Content on a book, ask them for the source.

Amazon changes these rules. The fifteen-projects-to-five change is proof of that, and both numbers are still being quoted as current across the web. Whatever you read about Premium A+ — including this page — check the date on it.

Related guides

• Amazon A+ Content for KDP: How to Set It Up
• KDP Keyword Research
• Amazon Ads for Authors
• Book Launch Checklist
• Self-Publishing Costs UK

Frequently asked questions

What are the requirements for Premium A+ Content?

Two things, on top of being a brand-registered seller with a Professional selling plan: a Brand Story module published on all of your brand-owned product listings, and five approved A+ Content projects in the last 12 months. The threshold was fifteen projects when Amazon launched the free promotion and was later reduced to five, which is why both figures still circulate. Access is granted at the end of each month and appears as a banner in A+ Content Manager — there is no application form.

Can KDP authors get Premium A+ Content?

Not through KDP. Premium requires a published Brand Story on every brand-owned listing, and Amazon’s KDP help pages do not mention Brand Story anywhere — it is not among the modules KDP illustrates. Reaching Premium means a registered trademark (from £205 in the UK, about $270), Amazon Brand Registry enrolment and a Professional selling plan at £25 a month excluding VAT, which is a different publishing model rather than a setting you can switch on.

Does Premium A+ Content cost anything?

No. Amazon’s seller tools page states A+ Content is “free for sellers who meet eligibility requirements”, and Premium has been free since Amazon opened it up as a promotion in 2022. That announcement described it as free “for an extended promotional period” with no end date, and added: “If we announce a fee for Premium A+ content we will invite you to opt in.” Treat it as current policy, not a permanent guarantee.

Can I put a video in my book’s A+ Content?

Only in Premium A+, which means only in Seller Central with a registered brand. Amazon’s design guide lists “integrated 720p videos” as a Premium feature, alongside hotspots, carousels and Q&A modules. KDP’s A+ Content help pages make no mention of video, and KDP’s guidelines prohibit animated images including GIFs, so there is no workaround for a KDP-published book — not a GIF, not an animated cover reveal.

How many modules can I use in A+ Content?

For KDP, Amazon states: “you can choose between 17 modules to design your detail page layout. You can use up to five modules per detail page layout.” In Seller Central, Amazon publishes “up to five Basic A+ Content modules per ASIN” and “up to seven modules per ASIN” for Premium. So the module count is the same for a KDP author as for a Basic A+ seller — the difference is which modules exist, not how many you may use.

Does A+ Content really increase sales by 20%?

Amazon claims Basic A+ “can increase sales by up to 8%” and Premium “up to 20%”, footnoted to Amazon internal data. Those two figures are the source of nearly every uplift number you will see quoted elsewhere, including in agency case studies presented as independent. There is no published methodology, sample size or category breakdown, the phrasing is “up to”, and the data covers all product categories rather than books specifically. The honest position is that A+ Content is worth having and the precise percentage is unsupported.

How long does KDP take to approve A+ Content?

Amazon’s KDP help page states that “All content in compliance with our A+ Content Guidelines will appear on your detail page within eight business days,” with a caveat that the timeline may extend during periods of high volume. Build that into your launch schedule — submit at least two weeks before publication day. Pre-order listings qualify, so you do not have to wait until the book is live, and one project can cover paperback, hardback and Kindle at once.