How to Price Your Self-Published Book So the Royalty Maths Works for You

Your price is the one lever in self-publishing you can move in an afternoon and measure within a week. It is also the one most authors set once, at upload, by copying the book next to theirs. That costs real money. List an ebook at $14.99 on Amazon and you keep 35% instead of 70%, so you earn less per copy than you would at $12.99. List a paperback below its printing floor and KDP will not let you publish it. Launch at 99 cents without an end date and you teach early readers to wait for the next discount. Every number below comes from the retailers' own help pages as of September 2026. Check them again before you commit, because these bands move.

Start from the royalty bands, not from the competition

On Amazon.com, KDP pays 70% on ebooks listed between $2.99 and $12.99. Outside that band you get 35%, and the 35% option has its own floors: $0.99 for files under 3 MB, $1.99 from 3 MB to 10 MB, $2.99 above that. The 70% option also charges a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte of the converted file. A 1 MB novel loses about 15 cents a sale. A 25 MB illustrated book loses $3.75, which can erase the gap between the two options. Our KDP guide covers the territory rules and the Select conditions, so this post takes them as read.

Two consequences follow. First, the useful ebook range is $2.99 to $12.99, and the ends of it pay very differently.

Second, the 70% option requires your ebook list price to sit at least 20% below the list price of any print edition on Amazon. A $12.99 ebook therefore needs a paperback at $16.24 or more. Set the two prices together, or one will quietly force the other.

Print has a floor you cannot argue with

KDP prints a black-ink paperback of 110 to 828 pages for $1.00 plus $0.012 a page on Amazon.com, so a 300-page novel costs $4.60. Royalty is 60% of list price at $9.99 and above, 50% below that, minus the printing cost. KDP's minimum list price is the printing cost divided by the rate. For the 300-page book that is $7.67, and at that price you earn nothing. At $12.99 you keep $3.19. At $15.99 you keep $4.99. A hardcover costs $5.65 plus $0.012 a page, so the same book costs $9.25 to print and needs a list price near $25 before the royalty is worth having.

IngramSpark works the other way round. You choose a wholesale discount between 40% and 55%, and you are paid the list price minus that discount, minus the print cost, minus a market access fee of 1.875% of list. Bookstores expect 55% and the option to return unsold copies. At a 55% discount you start from 45 cents on the dollar before print cost, against 60 cents on KDP, so the paperback that pays $3.19 at $12.99 on Amazon pays a fraction of that at the same price through Ingram. Run your book through IngramSpark's print-and-ship calculator before you set a list price, because the number has to work in both places at once. In practice that means pricing print for the Ingram channel and accepting a fatter margin on Amazon, not the reverse.

What 99 cents actually buys

A 99-cent ebook on the 35% option pays $0.35 a copy. A $2.99 ebook on the 70% option pays about $1.94. You need five and a half sales at 99 cents to match one at $2.99, so as a permanent price it only makes sense on the first book of a series where the later books carry the margin. As a launch tactic it holds up better, with two conditions. If the ebook is in KDP Select, a Kindle Countdown Deal lets you drop to $0.99 for up to seven days and keep 70%, so each copy pays $0.69 rather than $0.35. The regular price has to sit between $2.99 and $24.99 and stay unchanged for the 30 days before. Outside Select you simply lower the list price, earn 35% on it, and do your own advertising, since there is no countdown on the page. Either way, set the end date before you start. A discount with no end is just a low price.

Kindle Unlimited pays by the page

If the ebook is in Select it is also in Kindle Unlimited, and a borrow pays nothing until the reader reads. Amazon splits a monthly fund, $71.0 million for July 2026, across every page read on the platform, using its own standardised page count. Amazon does not publish the resulting rate. Authors work it out from their reports, and in recent months it has been under half a cent a page, so a 300-page novel read to the end earns roughly $1.25 to $1.45, about what a $2.99 sale pays after delivery. That changes how much your list price matters. In a borrow-heavy genre such as romance or thriller, a low price costs you little because most of the income arrives per page anyway. For a book that will be bought more than borrowed, a higher price does more work, and exclusivity may not be worth the trade.

Going wide changes the arithmetic

The other stores have no $12.99 ceiling. Apple Books pays 70% at any price with no delivery fee. Google Play pays 70% regardless of price once you accept its current terms. Kobo drops to 45% below $2.99, so a 99-cent first-in-series earns less there. This matters most for long nonfiction and box sets, where a $14.99 or $19.99 price pays 70% everywhere except Amazon, where it pays 35%. Two rules follow. Keep the same list price in every store, because Amazon can match a lower price it finds elsewhere and then pays your royalty on the matched price. And do not price for wide before you have sold enough on one store to know what your readers will pay. Our post on why going wide too early costs you sales explains when that point arrives.

Next steps

Open the pricing page for each title and check three things: which royalty option the ebook is on, the file size that sets its delivery fee, and whether the print list price is at least 25% above the ebook. Run the print edition through both KDP's and IngramSpark's calculators and take the higher floor. Then pick one price to test for 30 days, note sales and page reads before and after, and change one number at a time. If the print edition needs an ISBN you own, Bowker sells them in the US and resellers such as ISBNdirect do too; KDP's free ISBN works only on KDP. Whatever price you land on, write down why. The reason is what you will test next.