KDP royalties: 35%, 70%, and what actually lands in your account

August 10, 2026 · 3 min read

KDP offers two ebook royalty rates and the higher one is not simply better. It applies only inside a price band, only in certain territories, and it has a per-copy delivery fee deducted that the lower rate does not. For very short books at low prices, 35% can genuinely pay more.

The 70% option

Three conditions attach, and all must hold.

• The list price must fall inside a set band — broadly $2.99 to $9.99 in the US store, with equivalents elsewhere. Outside it, you drop to 35%.
• It applies in eligible territories only. Sales outside them pay 35% regardless of price.
• A delivery cost is deducted per copy sold, calculated from the file size in megabytes.

That third condition is the one that surprises people. The royalty is 70% of the list price minus the delivery cost — and delivery is charged on file size, so an image-heavy book can carry a meaningful per-sale deduction. A plain-prose novel is a small file and the fee is negligible; a cookbook or an illustrated children's book is not.

The 35% option

Flat 35% of list price, no delivery fee, no price band, all territories. It is the only option below the band and above it, which is why long technical books priced above the band and short works priced below it sit here.

Where the two cross over

At $2.99 the 70% tier pays roughly twice what the 35% tier does even after delivery, so within the band the higher tier almost always wins. The interesting cases are at the edges.

A book priced at $0.99 earns 35% — around 35 cents. To reach the 70% tier you would have to raise the price to $2.99, which triples the price to double the per-copy royalty. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how many sales you lose, which is a question about your readers and not about the royalty table.

Above the band the same logic runs in reverse. A specialist book at $14.99 earns 35% — about $5.25. Dropping to $9.99 to reach 70% would earn about $7 per copy. Here the lower price pays more per sale and probably sells more copies too, which is why the pricing advice for most non-specialist books is to stay inside the band.

Print royalties work differently

Paperbacks pay a fixed 60% of list price minus the printing cost, and printing is charged per copy based on page count and whether the interior is black-and-white or colour.

The consequence is a floor under your price. A long book, or any colour interior, has a printing cost high enough that a low list price yields no royalty at all — KDP will refuse a price that does not cover printing. Colour printing in particular is expensive enough to reshape the whole pricing decision, which is why so many illustrated books are ebook-first.

KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited

Enrolling in KDP Select makes the ebook exclusive to Amazon for the enrolment period and adds Kindle Unlimited borrows as an income stream. KU does not pay a royalty per borrow; it pays from a monthly global fund, divided by pages read across all participating titles.

That means the per-page rate is not fixed — it moves month to month with the size of the fund and the total pages read. It is typically a fraction of a cent per page, so a full read of a long book earns roughly what a sale might, and a reader who abandons at 10% earns roughly a tenth of that.

The trade is exclusivity. Enrolling closes Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play and every library platform that buys through them for the duration. Whether that is a good trade depends on whether your readers are on Amazon, which for most English-language genre fiction they overwhelmingly are.

The practical summary

1. Price inside the band and take 70% unless you have a specific reason not to.
2. Check your file size before assuming delivery cost is negligible — compress images if it is not.
3. For print, work backwards from printing cost to find the lowest viable price, then set above it.
4. Treat KDP Select as a distribution decision, not a royalty decision.