Amazon's 70% is not 70%, and the difference is your cover art
KDP deducts a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte from the list price before it applies the royalty rate. On a plain novel that is 30¢. On an illustrated book it is the difference between 70% and 59%.
Inkwharf · · 4 min read
Every author knows the KDP royalty is 70%. Rather fewer know that the 70% is applied to a number that is not the price of the book.
The fee, and where it sits in the sum
KDP charges a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte in the US on the 70% option. It is not a deduction from your royalty. It comes out of the list price first, and the royalty rate is applied to what is left:
royalty = 70% × (list price − delivery fee)
That order of operations is the whole article. Doing it the other way — taking 70% and then subtracting the fee — gives you a different, smaller-looking number, and it is the way most people assume it works.
On a $9.99 ebook of two megabytes, which is a plain novel with a cover:
70% × ($9.99 − $0.30) = $6.78
Not $6.99. The thirty cents is the fee, and it costs you 21¢ of royalty because it is taken before the split.
What it costs at real file sizes
Two megabytes is a text novel. Almost nothing else is two megabytes.
| File size | Delivery fee | You keep | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 MB — plain novel | $0.30 | $6.78 | 67.9% |
| 5 MB — a few illustrations | $0.75 | $6.47 | 64.7% |
| 10 MB — illustrated non-fiction | $1.50 | $5.94 | 59.5% |
| 25 MB — photography, cookbook | $3.75 | $4.37 | 43.7% |
A cookbook author at $9.99 is on 43.7%, not 70%, and nothing anywhere in the dashboard says so. The rate on the contract has not changed. The base it applies to has.
The verdict: the royalty rate is quoted on the price. The royalty is paid on the price minus your file size. For anything with pictures in it, those are different businesses.
The comparison nobody runs
Apple Books and Kobo both pay 70% and neither charges a delivery fee. Apple states it outright; Kobo's rate is flat above $2.99 with nothing deducted for size.
Which means the ranking between stores changes with your file:
| $9.99 book | Amazon KDP | Apple Books | Kobo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 MB | $6.78 | $6.99 | $6.99 |
| 10 MB | $5.94 | $6.99 | $6.99 |
| 25 MB | $4.37 | $6.99 | $6.99 |
At two megabytes the stores are within 21¢ of each other and the difference is not worth thinking about. At twenty-five megabytes Apple pays 60% more per copy than Amazon does. For an illustrated book sold wide, that is a reason to care which store a reader buys from — and an argument for putting the heavy edition where the fee is not.
Sold from your own shop the file size is irrelevant, because nobody is charging you for bandwidth by the megabyte: a $9.99 sale returns about $9.40 after card processing whether the book is two megabytes or two hundred.
Making the file smaller, which is mostly making the images smaller
Almost every oversized EPUB is oversized for one of three reasons, and all three are fixable in an afternoon without touching the text.
- Images saved at print resolution. A 300 DPI photograph sized for a printed page is four to eight times larger than anything a screen can show. Resize to about 1600 pixels on the long edge and re-save as JPEG at quality 80, or WebP if your tooling supports it. This alone typically removes 70–90% of the weight.
- PNG used for photographs. PNG is lossless and correct for line art, diagrams and anything with flat colour. For a photograph it produces a file several times larger than a JPEG nobody can tell apart.
- Whole font families embedded. Shipping four weights of a typeface to render two of them is common and costs a megabyte or so. Subset the fonts, or drop them and let the reader's device use its own — which most readers prefer anyway.
The cover is worth a specific check. A cover exported for print, at full resolution, embedded uncompressed, is regularly the single largest object in an EPUB and is displayed at a couple of hundred pixels wide.
What this is worth doing
Take your book's file size in megabytes, multiply by $0.15, and multiply by 0.7. That is what the fee costs you per copy. Multiply by the copies you sell in a year.
For most novelists the answer is a rounding error and the correct response is to stop reading and go back to writing. For anyone selling an illustrated book in volume it is a working week's income, recoverable in an afternoon of image compression.
Every figure above is in what every ebook platform keeps, per sale, dated and linked to the page it was read from, and the take-rate calculator runs the same arithmetic on your own price. The wider comparison is in direct sales versus the retailers.
Open a shop — no delivery fee, no cut of a sale, and the same EPUB stays on every retailer at the same time.
Sell your book to your own readers
A storefront, a checkout and file delivery, in about five minutes. No listing fee and nothing exclusive.