Want the 70% royalty on Amazon KDP? Price your ebook between $2.99 and $9.99. That's it, that's the headline answer. You also need to be in an eligible marketplace, and your file size matters because delivery costs get deducted from that 70% automatically. Stray outside that price window, and you drop to 35%. No exceptions, no grace period, no "well, actually." This one pricing decision quietly shapes how much money you actually keep from every single sale, which is exactly why it's worth sorting out before you even bring in a ghostwriting services team or finalize the manuscript.
Let's get into how the two tiers actually work, why Amazon built it this way, and how to price smart without quietly leaving money on the table.
Pricing. That's basically the whole answer.
• 70% tier — ebooks priced $2.99 to $9.99, in eligible marketplaces, under KDP Select or standard distribution.
• 35% tier — anything below $2.99, anything above $9.99, plus a few edge cases.
Here's the part that trips people up, though: "70% royalty" doesn't mean 70% of the cover price, full stop. Amazon takes a delivery fee based on your file size before doing the math. So two books priced identically at $4.99 can earn very different royalties depending on whether one is a lean text file and the other is packed with high-res images.
Because Amazon wants ebooks sitting in that impulse-buy zone somewhere between $2.99 and $9.99, the range where people click "Buy Now" without overthinking it. The 70% tier is basically Amazon's way of rewarding authors who price inside that comfort zone, something a good book publishing agency will usually flag before you ever hit "Publish."
Drop below $2.99, and Amazon assumes you're either running some kind of permafree strategy or undervaluing your own book; either way, you get bumped to 35%. Go above $9.99, and you're drifting into territory usually reserved for traditionally published titles with bigger production budgets behind them. Same penalty, different reason.
| Factor | 35% Tier | 70% Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Eligible Price Range | Under $2.99 or over $9.99 | $2.99 – $9.99 |
| Delivery Fee Deducted? | No | Yes, based on file size |
| Marketplace Availability | Nearly all KDP marketplaces | Limited to specific eligible ones |
| Best For | Free/discount promos, oversized files, premium niche non-fiction | Most fiction and standard-length non-fiction |
| How Authors Usually Treat It | A deliberate exception | The default |
Here's where it gets slightly less simple than people expect.
70% tier math: Royalty = (List Price × 0.70) − Delivery Fee
Delivery fee runs about $0.15 per megabyte in the U.S. marketplace. A lean 2MB ebook? Roughly $0.30 in fees. A heavily illustrated 20MB book? That's $3.00 vanishing before you see a cent, and yes, in some rare image-heavy cases, the 35% tier actually nets you more.
35% tier math: Royalty = List Price × 0.35
No delivery fee here at all. This is part of why a handful of authors with massive file sizes deliberately price into this tier on purpose.
Say your book is $4.99, file size 3MB.
• 70% tier: ($4.99 × 0.70) − ($0.15 × 3) = $3.49 − $0.45 = $3.04 per sale
• 35% tier, hypothetically priced at $1.99 instead: $1.99 × 0.35 = $0.70 per sale
$3.04 versus $0.70. Same book. The only thing that changed is a pricing decision. Multiply that gap across a few thousand sales, and suddenly, royalty tiers stop feeling like a minor detail.
Rarely. But not never.
You might lean toward 35% if you're pricing at $0.99 or $1.99 on purpose, a series starter meant to hook readers into book two, basically a loss leader. Or you're running a permafree window. Or your file is genuinely massive (cookbooks, art books, anything image-heavy), where delivery fees would chew through most of that 70% anyway. Or, less commonly, you're pricing specialized non-fiction above $9.99 because that audience already expects to pay more.
A few show up over and over:
• Pricing at $0.99 out of fear nobody will buy a debut, when $2.99 or $3.99 often sells just as well, for triple the royalty.
• Not checking the file size before publishing, then being confused why the royalty estimate came in lower than expected.
• Assuming the 70% tier applies everywhere automatically. It doesn't. A few marketplaces only ever offer 35%, regardless of price.
• Mixing up KDP Select exclusivity with royalty eligibility, they're related but not the same thing.
Pricing your book right on KDP isn't some throwaway formatting step; it's one of those rare decisions you make once that keeps paying you (or quietly costing you) on every single sale that follows. Stay in that $2.99–$9.99 range whenever your genre supports it, keep your file size lean, and double-check royalty eligibility per marketplace before you hit publish.
And if you're still in the middle of polishing the manuscript itself, bringing in solid book publishing services early can help you sidestep pricing mistakes before launch, getting formatting, file size, and metadata all dialed in so you're not quietly handing royalty points back to Amazon from day one.
Reach Out to Us for Further Assistance.
$2.99. Go a cent lower, and you're in the 35% tier automatically, no matter how small your file is.
No. Print royalties run on a totally different calculation based on printing costs, not these same percentage tiers.
Yes, anytime. Adjust your list price, and KDP recalculates your royalty tier on its own.
Not directly. KDP Select is about Kindle Unlimited page reads and exclusivity; your tier still comes down to price.
That's the delivery fee doing its thing. It comes out before the 70% hits your account, so bigger files always shave a bit off the payout.
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