How KDP Royalties Work

A royalty is the share of your book's list price that Amazon pays you. It is not the full price, and — for print books — it's not even your profit yet. Understanding the difference between list price, royalty, and profit is the first step to pricing a book that actually earns.

For paperbacks and hardcovers, Amazon pays a royalty based on your list price, then subtracts the cost of printing that copy before paying you. So your take-home on a print book is the royalty minus the print cost. Printing cost depends on page count, trim size, ink (black-and-white is far cheaper than color), and binding (hardcover costs more than paperback).

On Amazon's main marketplaces, paperbacks and hardcovers use a 60% royalty rate. Take a $9.99 paperback at 60%: the royalty is about $5.99. If printing that copy costs $2.85, your actual profit is $5.99 − $2.85 = $3.14, or roughly a 31% margin. The list price went up, but the printing cost is what really moves your profit.

Kindle eBooks work differently — there's no printing cost, so the royalty is your profit. Amazon offers two options: 35% or 70%. The 70% rate is only available when your book is priced in the $2.99–$9.99 band (and meets a few territory rules), and it carries a small per-megabyte delivery fee. The 35% rate has no delivery fee and applies to prices outside that band. For most eBooks in the sweet-spot price range, 70% wins easily.

Because print cost scales with the book, a long or color-heavy book eats into the royalty hard. A color interior or a hardcover binding can leave very little profit unless the list price is high. This is why low-content and black-and-white books are popular: their print costs stay low, so more of the royalty survives.

A 250-page black-and-white paperback, listed at $9.99, 60% royalty, $2.85 print cost. Royalty: $9.99 × 60% = $5.99. Minus print cost: $5.99 − $2.85 = $3.14 profit per sale.

That $3.14 — not the $5.99 royalty — is the number to build your plans on.

The takeaway: royalty is what Amazon credits you; profit is what's left after the print cost (for print books) and after any ad spend. Plan around profit per sale and you'll set prices and ad budgets that actually work.