2026-06-10 · all guides

KDP Royalty Calculator Guide: How Amazon Actually Computes Your Earnings

The two ebook royalty tiers

Every Kindle ebook sale pays out under one of two plans. The 70% plan is available when your list price is between $2.99 and $9.99, and it subtracts a delivery fee based on your file size before the percentage is applied. The 35% plan applies when you price below $2.99 or above $9.99, and it charges no delivery fee at all.

The formulas are simple. On the 70% plan: royalty = 70% x (list price - delivery fee). On the 35% plan: royalty = 35% x list price. You choose the plan yourself on the pricing page of the KDP dashboard, but the sensible choice is almost always dictated by your price: inside the $2.99-$9.99 window, 70% wins for any normal-sized file.

The delivery fee, in one paragraph

On the 70% plan, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte of your converted file size in the US store, rounded to the nearest cent. A typical text-only ebook converts to well under one megabyte, so the fee is usually a few cents. An image-heavy book can convert to 5 MB or more, which means $0.75 or more skimmed off every sale before your 70% is calculated.

You can see your exact converted file size on the KDP pricing page after you upload your manuscript. If the fee looks large, compressing images or cutting decorative graphics is the fix. The 35% plan never charges a delivery fee, which is why some photo-heavy books actually net more at 35%.

Worked ebook examples

A $4.99 ebook with a 1 MB file on the 70% plan: 70% x ($4.99 - $0.15) = $3.39 per sale. The same book at 35% would pay $1.75, so the 70% plan nearly doubles your income at this price.

A $2.99 ebook with a small 0.4 MB file: the delivery fee is about $0.06, so you earn 70% x $2.93 = $2.05. A $0.99 ebook is locked to the 35% plan and pays $0.35. And a $12.99 ebook is also locked to 35%, paying $4.55 - notably less than the $6.84 you would earn at $9.99 on the 70% plan. That cliff at $9.99 is the single most important number in Kindle pricing.

If you want these numbers without doing the arithmetic, the free Kindle royalty calculator at /tools/kindle-royalty-calculator lets you plug in any price and file size and see both plans side by side.

Paperback royalties work differently

Paperbacks pay a flat 60% of list price minus the printing cost, with no tier choice. For black-and-white books, KDP charges a fixed $2.30 to print anything under about 110 pages; at 110 pages and above, the cost is $0.85 plus $0.012 per page.

Example: a 200-page paperback costs $0.85 + (200 x $0.012) = $3.25 to print. Priced at $12.99, your royalty is 60% x $12.99 - $3.25 = $4.54. The same book at $9.99 earns $2.74. Because the printing cost is fixed, every dollar you add to the list price adds sixty cents to your royalty.

Putting it together before you publish

Run the math before you write, not after. A 30,000-word ebook at $4.99 earning $3.39 per sale needs about 30 sales a month to clear $100; the paperback edition adds a second royalty stream from the same manuscript. Knowing your per-unit number turns pricing from guesswork into a decision.

The production side matters too: your royalty math only pays off if the book actually gets finished and formatted to KDP spec. That is the part ebookdone automates - a complete, formatted, KDP-ready book for a one-time $9, so the spreadsheet you just built has something to sell.

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