Amazon KDP Royalties Explained

The formula, in one line

Every KDP royalty, in every format, comes from the same equation:

All the complexity lives in two variables. Which rate you get is decided partly by you and partly by your price. What counts as "costs" is a delivery fee for eBooks and a printing cost for print books. Get those two right and there is nothing else to know.

eBook royalties: 35% vs 70%

You choose one option per Kindle eBook, on the pricing screen.

At the same $4.99 price, the 70% option pays roughly $3.43 per sale and the 35% option pays $1.75. The choice is not close.

Pick 35% only when one of these is true:

• You want to price below $2.99, usually a $0.99 series starter, deliberately loss-leading to pull readers into book two.
• You want to price above $9.99: technical manuals, textbooks, professional references.
• Your book is primarily public domain material, which Amazon excludes from the 70% option entirely. Adding substantial original content (a real critical introduction, annotations, an original translation) restores eligibility.

The delivery fee nobody mentions

Choose 70% and Amazon deducts a delivery charge from every sale, calculated on your file's size. It averages about $0.06 per unit, which is trivial: until your book is full of images.

A text-only novel might be 1 MB. An illustrated cookbook or a photo-heavy nonfiction title can easily hit 20 MB, and the fee scales with it. On a $2.99 eBook, a large enough file can eat a meaningful slice of a royalty that was only ever going to be about $2.

The fix is free: compress your images before you build the file. Export at the resolution the device actually renders, not at print resolution. Most authors upload 300 DPI print images into a Kindle file that will never display them above 150 DPI, and then pay a delivery fee on the difference on every single sale, forever.

Why you see both 70% and 35% on one book

Open your Bookshelf and you may find both rates listed against the same title. This is not a bug.

The 70% option only applies to buyers located in the countries Amazon designates as 70% territories. A sale to a customer outside those territories pays 35%, even though you selected the 70% option. Because Amazon.com serves customers worldwide, both rates get displayed, and the one you actually receive is determined per sale by where the buyer is.

Practically: your effective royalty rate is a blend, and it depends on your readership's geography. Authors with heavy readership outside North America and Western Europe consistently earn less than the 70% figure suggests, and are often baffled by it.

Paperback royalties: the 50/60% cliff

This is the part that most self-publishing guides still have wrong, including several currently ranking at the top of Google.

KDP does not pay a flat 60% on paperbacks. It pays 50% or 60%, and your list price alone decides which.

The thresholds differ by store:

If you price your paperback at $9.95 because it "looks better", you are choosing to earn 50% instead of 60%. That is a real decision with a real cost, and almost nobody making it knows they are making it.

How printing costs are calculated

After the royalty rate is applied, Amazon subtracts what it cost to manufacture the book. The formula:

Three inputs drive it: ink type, trim size band, and marketplace. Here are the Amazon.com figures.

Three things worth pulling out of that table:

• Short books get a free ride. Under 110 pages, black ink, you pay a flat $2.30 and no per-page charge at all. A 40-page book and a 105-page book cost exactly the same to print.
• Premium colour is punishing. At $0.065 per page it is more than five times the black-ink rate. A 200-page premium-colour paperback costs $14.00 to print before you have earned a cent.
• Bleed and cover finish are free. Matte or glossy, bleed or no bleed, no effect on cost. Choose them on aesthetics alone.

KDP also offers groundwood paper, a cheaper stock running roughly 5% below cream or white per page. On a long book that is real money; on a short one it is pennies.

Worked examples

A 300-page novel, black ink, regular trim, Amazon.com

Printing cost: $1.00 + (300 × $0.012) = $4.60

The jump from $9.98 to $9.99 multiplies your royalty by 3.6×. The jump from $9.99 to $14.99, a price most readers would not blink at for a 300-page paperback, multiplies it again.

Rule of thumb: price a paperback at roughly 2.5× to 3× its printing cost, and never let it land below your marketplace's 60% threshold. Both conditions are usually satisfied somewhere between $12.99 and $16.99 for a standard novel.

Hardcover royalties

Hardcovers use the same 50/60% rate structure and the same subtract-the-printing-cost logic. The printing cost is simply higher.

A 300-page hardcover: $5.65 + (300 × $0.012) = $9.25 to print, against $4.60 for the paperback. Which is why hardcovers list at $24.99 and above, and why they are not worth publishing unless your reader has a reason to want the object.

Note the floor: hardcovers require a minimum of 75 pages, and the format is not eligible for Expanded Distribution.

Expanded Distribution: the 40% trap

Expanded Distribution pushes your paperback out to bookstores, libraries and other retailers. The royalty is 40% of list price, minus the same printing cost.

Run the numbers on that 300-page book at $9.99:

Negative. This is exactly why KDP enforces a minimum list price and will refuse to let you publish below it.

Expanded Distribution is only viable at a higher price point. If you want it, price accordingly: for most 300-page paperbacks that means $14.99 or above, where the same sale returns (0.40 × $14.99) − $4.60 = $1.40.

Minimum list price, and why KDP blocks you

KDP will not let you set a price at which you would lose money. The minimum is:

For our 300-page book in the 60% band: $4.60 ÷ 0.60 = $7.67. If you enable Expanded Distribution, the rate drops to 40% and the minimum jumps to $4.60 ÷ 0.40 = $11.50.

So enabling Expanded Distribution can force your price up. That is not a bug. It is Amazon preventing you from selling at a loss. But it does mean the decision to go into Expanded Distribution is also a decision about your retail price, and the two cannot be made independently.

The five mistakes that cost the most

1. Pricing a paperback just under the threshold. $9.95 instead of $9.99. Costs you a third or more of your royalty on every copy.
2. Uploading print-resolution images into a Kindle file. Inflates the file, inflates the delivery fee, and the reader's device downsamples them anyway.
3. Choosing premium colour when standard colour would do. $0.065 versus $0.0255 per page. On a 200-page book that is a $7.90 difference in printing cost per copy.
4. Enabling Expanded Distribution without repricing. Either KDP blocks you, or you accept a minimum price you did not intend.
5. Leaving the book at 35% because the pricing screen defaulted there. It happens more than you would think. Check the setting on every title.

None of these are difficult to avoid. All of them are permanent until you notice and fix them, and the royalties you lost in the meantime do not come back.

Frequently asked questions

One royalty stream is missing from this page entirely: Kindle Unlimited, which pays per page read rather than per copy sold, and which requires exclusivity. That trade-off is covered in KDP Select vs. going wide.

Royalties are one decision inside a longer process. For the full sequence (manuscript, editing, formatting, cover, upload and launch) see our guide to how to self-publish a book on Amazon. If you are still deciding whether the numbers work at all, start with what it costs to self-publish on Amazon.