# The royalty band your price falls into, and the dollar that halves it

Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $12.99 and 35% outside it. Not a taper — a cliff. Pricing a book at $13.99 instead of $12.99 takes about $4 a copy off you, and nothing in the pricing form mentions it.

- Published: 2026-08-31
- Last updated: 2026-08-31
- Author: Inkwharf
- Canonical: https://www.inkwharf.com/blog/the-royalty-band-your-price-falls-into
- Publisher: Inkwharf — https://www.inkwharf.com/llms.txt

## Takeaways

- Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $12.99 and 35% on either side of that band.
- Moving from $12.99 to $13.99 drops the author from $8.88 a copy to about $4.90 — a dollar of list price costing four dollars of income.
- Kobo has one cliff at $2.99 and none above it; Apple pays 70% at any price.
- Above $12.99, the store you are selling through matters more than the price you chose.

---
Ask an author why their book costs $9.99 and you will usually get an answer
about what the market bears. Ask enough authors and the answer starts to look
less like a market and more like everyone standing on the same ledge.

## Where the ledges are

Amazon's 70% royalty is available only for books priced from **$2.99 to
$12.99**. Outside that band, at any price above or below, the rate is 35%.

It does not taper. There is no zone where you get 60% or 50%. One cent across
the line and half your income is gone.

| List price | Rate | You keep |
| --- | --- | --- |
| $2.98 | 35% | $1.04 |
| $2.99 | 70% | $1.88 |
| $9.99 | 70% | $6.78 |
| $12.99 | 70% | $8.88 |
| $13.99 | 35% | $4.90 |

Read the bottom two rows again. Charging a dollar more takes **$3.98 a copy**
away from you. A reader pays more, and you are paid roughly half. On a thousand
copies that is $3,980, and the only visible difference is a digit.

The top two rows of the band are why $9.99 exists as a price at all. It is not
that $9.99 is optimal. It is that it is comfortably inside the only zone where a
retailer pays a full rate, and nobody wants to find out where the edge is by
standing on it.

> **The verdict:** the pricing of independent publishing is not a market
> outcome. It is a royalty table wearing a market's clothes, and almost every
> book you have ever seen priced at $9.99 is standing well back from a ledge.

## The stores do not agree on where the ledges are

This is the part that makes the band worth understanding rather than just
avoiding.

- **Amazon KDP** — 70% from $2.99 to $12.99; 35% above and below.
- **Kobo** — 70% from $2.99 upwards, with no ceiling at all; 45% below $2.99.
- **Apple Books** — 70% at any price, with no bands and no delivery fee.

So the three stores agree at $9.99 and diverge completely at the edges:

| List price | Amazon | Kobo | Apple |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $2.49 | $0.87 | $1.12 | $1.74 |
| $9.99 | $6.78 | $6.99 | $6.99 |
| $19.99 | $7.00 | $13.99 | $13.99 |

At $19.99 — an ordinary price for a technical manual or a professional
reference — Apple and Kobo pay **twice** what Amazon does. The book is the
same, the reader pays the same, and the store keeps an extra seven dollars for
no reason the author was told about.

This is the strongest practical argument for publishing wide that does not rely
on anybody's opinion about ecosystems. If your book belongs above $12.99, the
largest store in the market is the worst place to sell it, by a factor of two.

## What to actually do about it

**If your book belongs inside the band**, which most fiction does, price it
where you like between $2.99 and $12.99 and stop thinking about this. The bands
only bite at the edges.

**If you are near an edge, back away from it.** $12.99 and $13.99 are not
adjacent prices, they are different businesses. $2.99 and $2.98 likewise. Any
price within a few cents of a boundary is a mistake waiting for someone to
round it.

**If your book genuinely belongs above $12.99** — a manual, a course companion,
a professional reference, a box set — then the retailer band is now the single
largest fee in your business, and it is worth knowing what the alternatives pay.
Apple and Kobo pay full rate. A direct sale at $19.99 returns about **$19.11**
after card processing, against Amazon's $7.00. Selling direct does not replace
the retailers, and the honest limits on that are in
[direct sales versus the retailers](/blog/direct-sales-versus-the-retailers) —
but at this price point it stops being a marginal difference and starts being
most of the money.

**If you sell a series**, price the box set with the band in mind. Four novels
at $12.99 is inside; the same four at $15.99 is not, and the discount you
thought you were giving the reader costs you more than the discount.

## Check it rather than trusting me

Rates move, and a post is a snapshot. Every figure here is in
[what every ebook platform keeps, per sale](/data/ebook-platform-fees), which
carries the date each rate was last read and links the store's own page for it.
The [take-rate calculator](/tools/take-rate) will run the sum on your price.

One caveat on the figures above the band: Amazon's delivery fee applies to the
70% option, so the 35% rows here are 35% of list with nothing deducted. If you
are pricing above $12.99 it is worth confirming that against your own KDP
dashboard, because it is the one number in this post that varies by territory.

**[Open a shop](/register?role=author)** — one price, one rate, no bands, and
your book stays on every retailer at the same time.