Every author who prices an ebook on Amazon eventually runs into the same wall: KDP pays 70% on some books and 35% on others, and the difference isn't always obvious until the royalty report shows up smaller than expected. The kindle royalty percentage you get depends on price, marketplace, and a fee most authors forget to budget for — the delivery fee. None of it is complicated once you see the actual math, so let's walk through it.
The two royalty tiers, plainly
KDP offers two royalty options for ebooks: 35% and 70%. You don't choose one and stick with it forever — eligibility is checked per book, per marketplace, based on list price.
70% royalty requirements
To qualify for the 70% tier, your ebook generally needs to meet all of these:
- List price between $2.99 and $9.99 (or the local-currency equivalent) in that marketplace
- Priced at least 20% below the print list price, if you have a paperback or hardcover edition
- Available in all territories where you hold rights
- Enrolled in the standard KDP program (Kindle Select enrollment is separate and optional — it affects Kindle Unlimited pages read, not this base royalty rate)
Miss any of those conditions and Amazon defaults that title to 35%, even if you never intended to.
35% royalty: not a punishment, just a different math
The 35% tier applies to any ebook priced below $2.99 or above $9.99, and it has one meaningful advantage: no delivery fee. If you're deliberately pricing a short story at $0.99 as a series lead magnet, 35% with no delivery fee can actually work out better than you'd assume — you just need to run the numbers rather than assume 70% is always the winning choice.
What the delivery fee actually costs you
This is the part that catches new authors off guard. Books in the 70% tier aren't paid a flat 70% of list price — Amazon deducts a delivery fee first, calculated on file size, not word count.
In the US store, the delivery fee is $0.15 per megabyte of your final converted file. A lean 90,000-word novel with a simple cover and no embedded images might land around 1–2 MB, costing $0.15–$0.30 per sale. A heavily illustrated cookbook or a book with a full-bleed cover image and lots of formatting can run 20 MB or more, and that same fee jumps to $3.00 — enough to meaningfully change your per-copy profit.
Here's the formula in full:
Royalty = (List Price × 0.70) − Delivery Fee
Two worked examples make it concrete.
- Novel, $4.99 list price, 2 MB file: (4.99 × 0.70) − (2 × 0.15) = 3.49 − 0.30 = $3.19 royalty per sale
- Illustrated guide, $7.99 list price, 15 MB file: (7.99 × 0.70) − (15 × 0.15) = 5.59 − 2.25 = $3.34 royalty per sale
Notice the second book, despite a higher list price, barely nets more than the first once the delivery fee is factored in. If that illustrated guide were priced at $9.99 instead, the delivery fee would eat a larger share of the increase than most authors expect.
Why file size matters more than authors think
Delivery fee is calculated on the final converted file KDP generates, not your source manuscript. A few things quietly inflate it:
- High-resolution cover images embedded at print resolution instead of screen resolution
- Custom fonts embedded in the EPUB
- Interior illustrations, charts, or photos, especially uncompressed ones
- Excessive front-matter formatting with background images or decorative elements repeated per chapter
A plain-text novel with a standard cover rarely triggers a noticeable fee. A nonfiction book with diagrams, a recipe book with photos, or a children's picture book can see the delivery fee become a real line item rather than a rounding error. If you're formatting an illustrated title, it's worth exporting a test file and checking its size before you lock in a price — a $0.50 difference in delivery fee on a $6.99 book is a much bigger deal than the same $0.50 on a $19.99 book.
Running the actual numbers before you set a price
Guessing your royalty from memory is how authors end up disappointed on release day. Because the delivery fee depends on your specific file, the only reliable way to know your take-home is to calculate it directly rather than estimate. Pendrilo's free KDP royalty calculator handles both tiers — enter your list price and file size and it shows the 70% royalty after delivery fee alongside the 35% alternative, so you can compare them side by side instead of doing the arithmetic in a spreadsheet every time you consider a price change.
This matters most in three situations: pricing a new release, deciding whether a promotional price drop to $0.99 still nets anything worthwhile, and checking whether a heavily formatted nonfiction title should be split, trimmed, or repriced above $9.99 to make the file-size hit less painful relative to revenue.
Keeping royalty math out of your head and in the workflow
Royalty tiers aren't a one-time decision — they interact with your KDP listing every time you update price, categories, or territories, and a small pricing slip (say, sliding from $9.99 to $10.49 during a "round number" update) silently drops a book from 70% to 35% with no warning banner. If you're managing several titles or a series with staggered pricing, that's an easy thing to lose track of in the KDP dashboard alone.
Pendrilo's KDP listing tracker keeps draft and live versions of each book's description, categories, and keyword slots in one place, which makes it easier to notice when a pricing change might tip a book out of the 70% range before you publish, rather than after the first royalty report. It won't calculate the royalty itself — that's what the calculator is for — but having your listing details versioned and visible alongside the rest of your manuscript work means fewer surprises. If you're setting up a full workflow from draft to KDP-ready files, you can see how the pieces fit together by trying Pendrilo on your own manuscript.
The short version
70% royalty requires a list price between $2.99 and $9.99, full territorial rights, and a print price at least 20% higher if you have a print edition — and even then, Amazon deducts a delivery fee based on file size before you see that 70%. 35% royalty has no delivery fee, which occasionally makes it the better deal for very cheap books. The only way to know for certain which tier nets more for your specific book is to run your actual list price and file size through the math rather than assume — the delivery fee is small per sale, but it compounds across every copy you ever sell.
