What the royalty split actually costs an independent author
Run the arithmetic on a $9.99 ebook through a retailer, then through a shop that takes nothing but the payment. The gap is about $2.62 a copy — and the delivery fee that causes half of it is charged by the megabyte.
Inkwharf · · 4 min read · Updated
Publishing arithmetic is dull until you do it on your own book, at which point it becomes the most interesting arithmetic in your life. So let's do it on a $9.99 ebook, sold a thousand times, with the fees that do not appear on the dashboard.
The familiar channel
The headline is 70%. On a $9.99 ebook that suggests $6.99 a copy.
It is not $6.99, because a delivery fee is deducted first. Amazon charges
$0.15 per megabyte and takes it out of the list price before applying the
royalty rate — so a plain novel with a cover, about two megabytes, is charged
$0.30, and the sum is 70% × ($9.99 − $0.30), which is $6.78.
Thirty cents sounds like rounding. It is not: on a thousand copies it is $210, and on an illustrated book of ten megabytes the fee is $1.50 a copy and the royalty falls to $5.94 — an effective rate of 59%, not 70%. The fee scales with your images and nothing else, which is worked through in Amazon's 70% is not 70%. A cookbook and a novella at the same price are not the same deal.
So the retailer's share of a $9.99 sale is $3.21, or 32.1% — advertised as 30%, which it would be if the file weighed nothing.
A thousand copies at $6.78 is $6,780.
The band the rate lives in
The 70% is also conditional on price, and the condition is sharper than most authors realise. Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $12.99. Outside that, on either side, it pays 35%.
Not a taper. A cliff.
| List price | Rate | You keep |
|---|---|---|
| $2.98 | 35% | $1.04 |
| $2.99 | 70% | $1.88 |
| $12.99 | 70% | $8.88 |
| $13.99 | 35% | $4.90 |
Charging one dollar more than $12.99 takes $3.98 a copy off you. Charging one cent less than $2.99 nearly halves what you get. This is why nearly every independent ebook in the world is priced between $2.99 and $12.99, and why so many cluster at $9.99 exactly: the pricing of independent publishing is not a market outcome, it is a royalty table wearing a market's clothes.
Where those ledges sit on each store, and what a book above the band is worth somewhere else, is the royalty band your price falls into.
The verdict: the number that decides your income is not the royalty rate. It is which side of a boundary you priced on, and the boundary is not on the page where you type the price.
What the same sale pays direct
Sell the same book from your own shop and the money arrives through a card processor rather than a store. That costs roughly 2.9% + 30¢, or about 59¢ on a $9.99 sale — call it $9.40 to the author.
$6.78 against $9.40. A thousand copies: $6,780 against $9,400, a gap of $2,620.
Two things about that gap, both of which cut against the number.
The first is that these are not the same thousand copies. A retailer has a search box that millions of people type into intending to buy a book; your website does not. Three times the margin on a fifth of the volume is a pay cut, and the honest version of this comparison is the one in direct sales versus the retailers, which works out where the crossover actually falls.
The second is that the two figures are not the same kind of number. The retailer's cut has card processing inside it — they are the merchant of record and the card fee is theirs to pay. The direct figure has it taken out separately, because you are the merchant and Stripe bills you. Netting one against the other without saying so would flatter direct selling by about three per cent, which is a thing done often enough to be worth naming.
Where bitcoin lands
If a reader pays in bitcoin, the payment goes from their wallet to a wallet you control, and the network fee is paid by the buyer rather than deducted from the price. The author receives the full $9.99.
That is a real difference and it is not the argument for selling direct. Most readers will pay by card, cards are what the checkout leads with, and an author who never switches bitcoin on keeps the $9.40 above either way. It is worth having for the readers who ask for it and worth nothing to the ones who don't — which is roughly the correct weight to give it.
What this shop takes
Nothing per sale, on either rail, on any plan.
That is not generosity. Card payments are charged with your own Stripe key on your own account, and bitcoin payments land at addresses derived from a key you hold. No money passes through here, so there is no point at which a percentage could be taken. What is left to charge for is the shop itself, at a flat monthly price that does not grow when your book does.
Check the numbers rather than trusting them
Every figure above — the bands, the delivery fee, what each retailer and each platform keeps — is in what every ebook platform keeps, per sale, dated and linked to the page it was read from. If a rate has moved since this post was written, that table is where it will show up first.
To run it on your own price and volume, the take-rate calculator does the sum with your numbers in it.
Open a shop — free to start, nothing per sale, and no exclusivity in either direction.
Sell your book to your own readers
A storefront, a checkout and file delivery, in about five minutes. No listing fee and nothing exclusive.