KDP royalties explained — what Amazon actually pays

KDP pays a percentage of the price a reader pays — not of what you spent. That one sentence explains most of the confusion around royalties, and it is why two books with the same page count can earn very differently at prices one cent apart.

The formula, in the order KDP applies it

Amazon applies three steps, always in this order. First it works out the printing cost from the page count, the ink and paper, the trim size and the marketplace. Then it multiplies your list price by the royalty rate — 60% or 50% for a paperback. Finally it subtracts the printing cost from that product.

Written as an equation: royalty = rate × list price − printing cost. There is no deduction for editing, cover design, advertising or the time you spent writing. Those are real costs, but KDP never sees them, which is why “royalty” and “profit” are two different numbers.

The same formula runs on every marketplace, with local prices and local printing rates. That matters more than it sounds: a book that earns comfortably in the United States can earn almost nothing in a market where the 60% tier starts at a lower price, because the threshold is local currency, not a converted dollar figure.

The 60% cliff

A paperback earns 50% of the list price below a marketplace threshold and 60% at or above it. In the US the threshold sits between $9.98 and $9.99: at $9.98 the rate is 50%, at $9.99 it is 60%. That is not a rounding detail. One cent of price changes the rate on the whole sale.

Run the numbers on a 300-page book: printing costs $4.60. At $9.98 the royalty is $0.39. At $9.99 it is $1.39. The reader pays one cent more; you earn $1.00 more. This is the single most useful fact in paperback pricing, and it is why “lower the price to sell more” can quietly cut your income per copy to almost nothing.

The cliff cuts the other way too. If a book is priced well below the threshold and the printing cost is high, the 50% rate can produce a negative royalty — KDP will still print it, but you pay the difference. That is why the calculator shows a minimum viable price rather than just the royalty at your current price.

Printing cost: fixed plus per page

Printing cost has two shapes. Short black-ink paperbacks — up to 110 pages in most marketplaces, 108 in Australia — are charged a flat rate with no per-page component at all. A 100-page black-and-white 6×9 costs the same as a 24-page one. Past that line, the cost becomes a fixed charge plus a per-page charge for every page.

Two details trip people up. The first is trim size: a book wider than 6.12 inches or taller than 9 inches is charged at the large-trim rate, which is higher even at the same page count. An 8.5×11 coloring book and a 6×9 novel with identical page counts do not print for the same money.

The second is page-count rounding. KDP bills the page count of the file you upload and rounds it up to an even number, so a 167-page interior is billed as 168. The difference is small on one copy, but it is real on a print run and it changes the spine width, which changes the cover wrap.

A worked example: 300 pages at $12.99

Take a 300-page 6×9 black-and-white paperback in the US. Printing is $4.60. At a $12.99 list price the rate is 60%, so the royalty is $3.19 a copy. Sell 100 copies and that is $319.00 before tax; sell 1,000 and it is $3,190.00.

Now price the same book at $9.98. The rate drops to 50% and the royalty becomes $0.39 — a $2.80 difference per copy, from a three-dollar price change. The book is cheaper for the reader, which may sell more copies, but every copy earns a fraction of what it did. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how elastic demand is, and that is a marketing question, not a maths question.

The minimum viable price for this book is $9.20. Below it the royalty at the 50% rate would be negative; at $9.99 the 60% tier takes over and pays more than $9.98 does. The calculator shows both numbers side by side so the edge case is visible rather than surprising.

Expanded distribution is a different rate

Expanded distribution puts the paperback into other retailers and library catalogues, and it pays a flat 40% with the printing cost still deducted. On the same 300-page $12.99 book that is $0.60 a copy instead of $3.19 — roughly a third of the standard rate.

That does not make it useless. Some authors keep it on for the catalogue presence and the occasional library order, treating it as marketing rather than revenue. But it should be a decision, not a default: the checkbox is easy to leave on and the difference per copy is large.

Ebook royalties work differently

Ebooks have no printing cost, but they have a delivery fee and a price band. On the 70% plan, Amazon pays 70% of the list price minus a delivery fee per megabyte and any VAT. Outside the eligible price band the rate drops to 35%, and the delivery fee disappears.

For a $9.99 ebook with a 2 MB file in the US, the 70% plan pays about $6.91 after the delivery fee. The same title at $13.99 falls outside the band and pays 35% instead — which is why ebook pricing tends to cluster just under the ceiling rather than above it. The exact bands are local; the US and UK do not share a single number.

Four mistakes that quietly cost money

• Pricing one cent under the threshold. It looks like a bargain price and it silently takes 10 percentage points off every sale.
• Forgetting the large-trim rate. A 7×10 or 8.5×11 book pays more to print than a 6×9 at the same page count, which moves the minimum viable price up.
• Comparing royalties across currencies. A royalty shown in pounds is not comparable to one in dollars without converting, and the thresholds are local, so the ranking of marketplaces changes with the exchange rate.
• Leaving expanded distribution on by default. It is a 40% rate with the same printing cost. Decide it deliberately.

None of these require a spreadsheet to avoid. They require looking at the number the calculator gives you before you type a price into KDP, and knowing which side of the threshold you want to be on. If you are still choosing a title length and page count, the word count guide shows what a manuscript becomes as pages, and the formatting guide covers the trim and margin decisions that set the printing cost in the first place.

If you would rather see the whole pricing surface at once, the book pricing calculator shows the royalty at every price, with the cliff marked. And if you are weighing a coloring book or a children’s title against a novel, the sample books show the same numbers on real layouts.

What this model leaves out

The formula covers printing and the royalty rate. It does not cover tax, currency conversion, returns, promotional pricing or the cost of the files themselves. Those are real parts of the business, but they sit outside KDP’s royalty calculation, and mixing them in makes the number harder to check.

Currency is the one that surprises people most. Each marketplace sets its own threshold in local currency, so a price that clears the 60% tier in dollars may sit below it in pounds or euros. When you compare marketplaces, compare the royalty in local currency first, then convert — a converted number hides which side of the threshold the book is on.

Tax is withheld according to your tax interview and your country’s treaty position, and it is applied to the royalty KDP calculates, not to the list price. That means the amount that lands in your account is the royalty from this formula minus withholding, which is why a calculator and a bank statement rarely match to the cent.

Finally, the model assumes one copy sold at the list price. Promotions, free days and countdown deals change the price the reader pays, and the royalty follows that price. If you plan to run a promotion, run the promoted price through the calculator rather than assuming the regular royalty holds.

Where the numbers come from

The rate tables are taken from Amazon KDP’s published help pages — paperback royalty, printing cost, ebook royalty and the submission guidelines — and re-checked monthly. Each calculator page prints the check date next to the number, and the rate table is versioned in code so a change shows up as a reviewable diff rather than a silent edit.

Sources: paperback royalty, printing cost, ebook royalties and trim, bleed and margins. Marketplace thresholds and printing rates change; the date on the page is the only promise this site makes about freshness.