2026-06-22 · all guides

KDP Delivery Fees Explained: The Hidden Charge on 70% Royalties

What the delivery fee is

When you choose the 70% royalty plan, Amazon charges a small fee to "deliver" your ebook to each buyer, deducted before your percentage is applied. In the US store it is $0.15 per megabyte of your converted file size, with a minimum of one cent. Other marketplaces have their own per-MB rates in local currency.

The formula on the 70% plan is therefore: royalty = 70% x (list price - delivery fee). The 35% plan charges no delivery fee at all - the fee is effectively the toll you pay for the higher percentage.

Converted size, not upload size

The fee is based on the size of the file after Amazon converts it to its Kindle format, not the size of the document you upload. Text compresses extremely well: a 40,000-word manuscript typically converts to under half a megabyte, making the fee around $0.06 or less.

Images are what inflate it. Every photo, chart, and decorative flourish survives conversion, and a book with dozens of full-resolution images can easily convert to 5-20 MB. KDP shows you the converted size and the exact fee on the pricing page before you publish, so there is never a reason to be surprised by it.

The fee also scales with every future sale, which is what makes it worth an hour of attention. A one-megabyte difference in file size is $0.15 per copy - trivial on one sale, but $150 across a thousand sales of a book you expect to sell for years. Optimizing the file once is the rare piece of publishing work that pays a small dividend on every transaction afterward.

When the fee changes your plan choice

For normal text books, the fee is trivial: on a $4.99 novel with a 0.5 MB file you lose about eight cents, earning $3.44 instead of $3.49. Ignore it and move on.

For image-heavy books, run the comparison. A $4.99 photo-rich cookbook converting to 15 MB pays a $2.25 delivery fee, so the 70% plan yields 70% x ($4.99 - $2.25) = $1.92 - while the 35% plan, with no fee, pays $1.75. The gap has nearly closed, and at 18 MB the 35% plan actually wins. This is the one situation where choosing 35% inside the $2.99-$9.99 window is rational.

How to shrink your file

Resize images before inserting them - screens do not need print resolution, and 1,200 pixels on the long edge is plenty for most figures. Use JPEG for photos and keep charts simple. Cut decorative images that add no information; each one is a recurring tax on every future sale. If your book is genuinely image-driven, consider whether some material belongs in a companion PDF or the paperback edition, since print books have no delivery fee.

A cleanly generated file helps too. Books produced by ebookdone are formatted as lean, KDP-ready files, so the delivery fee on a typical text book stays down in the pennies where it belongs.

The quick decision rule

Check your converted file size on the KDP pricing page. Under 1 MB: take the 70% plan and forget the fee exists. Between 1 and 10 MB: the 70% plan still wins at most prices, but compress what you can. Over 10 MB: calculate both plans at your intended price, because 35% with no fee may genuinely pay more. Two minutes with a calculator settles it for your specific book.

And keep the fee in perspective. It is the only per-sale cost Amazon charges ebook publishers, there is no listing fee, no monthly fee, and no charge for price changes - so a few cents per delivery is the entire overhead of keeping a well-made text ebook on the world's largest bookstore.

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