# 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%.

- Published: 2026-08-31
- Last updated: 2026-08-31
- Author: Inkwharf
- Canonical: https://www.inkwharf.com/blog/amazons-70-percent-is-not-70-percent
- Publisher: Inkwharf — https://www.inkwharf.com/llms.txt

## Takeaways

- The delivery fee is charged per megabyte and comes out of the list price before the royalty rate is applied.
- A 2 MB novel keeps $6.78 of a $9.99 sale. A 10 MB illustrated book keeps $5.94 — an effective rate of 59%, not 70%.
- Apple Books and Kobo charge no delivery fee at all, so a heavy file is worth more on them than on Amazon.
- Most of the weight in a heavy EPUB is images saved at print resolution, and shrinking them is an afternoon.

---
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.

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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](/data/ebook-platform-fees), dated
and linked to the page it was read from, and the
[take-rate calculator](/tools/take-rate) runs the same arithmetic on your own
price. The wider comparison is in
[direct sales versus the retailers](/blog/direct-sales-versus-the-retailers).

**[Open a shop](/register?role=author)** — no delivery fee, no cut of a sale,
and the same EPUB stays on every retailer at the same time.