Price a full-length novel inside Amazon's 70% royalty band, which on Amazon.com now runs from $2.99 to $12.99, then pick the spot in that band your genre's readers expect. At $4.99 with a 2 MB file you keep $3.28 a sale; at $0.99 you keep $0.35. If the book opens a series, a lower or free first book often earns more across the whole series than a higher price earns on book one alone.
The rest of this guide gives Amazon's exact rules, the arithmetic, and the strategy. Use the calculator to test your own numbers as you read.
Amazon's two royalty options, exactly
KDP gives every ebook a choice between a 35% and a 70% royalty option, per Amazon's eBook Royalties page. The formulas, from the Digital Book Pricing Page:
- 35%: 0.35 × (list price − VAT). No delivery cost.
- 70%: 0.70 × (list price − VAT − delivery cost), for sales to customers in Amazon's listed 70% territories. Sales to customers elsewhere pay 35%.
The 70% territories include the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, among others on the pricing page. Brazil, Japan, Mexico and India pay 70% only when the book is enrolled in KDP Select. You don't have to live in a 70% territory to earn it; the royalties page says the rate depends on where the buyer is. That is also why your Bookshelf can show both rates for the same title on Amazon.com.
Books that consist primarily of public-domain content are limited to 35%.
The 2026 price band change
This is the biggest pricing change for indie authors in years. Effective July 7, 2026, Amazon's list price requirements set the 70% band on Amazon.com at $2.99 to $12.99, up from $2.99 to $9.99, "with equivalent changes in other KDP marketplaces." Amazon's FAQ on the same page notes the $9.99 ceiling "has been in place since 2007." The $2.99 floor, the 35% option and delivery costs did not change, and nobody was required to reprice.
Any guide that still tells you $9.99 is the 70% ceiling is out of date.
Minimum and maximum prices
Under the 35% option on Amazon.com, the minimum list price depends on file size: $0.99 under 3 MB, $1.99 from 3 MB to under 10 MB, and $2.99 at 10 MB or more. The maximum is $200. There is no $0 option; free pricing only comes from KDP Select promo days or price matching, covered below.
Delivery costs: the fee most authors forget
Under the 70% option, Amazon deducts a delivery cost for every sale. On Amazon.com it is $0.15 per MB; in the UK £0.10 per MB; in the euro stores €0.12 per MB, according to the Digital Book Pricing Page. Amazon rounds file sizes up to the nearest kilobyte and charges at least $0.01. Its royalties page puts average delivery costs at $0.06 per unit, so for a text-only novel the fee is small.
It isn't small for illustrated books. The 70% option beats 35% only while 0.70 × (price − delivery) is larger than 0.35 × price. At $4.99, that stops being true at about 16.6 MB. A 20 MB picture book at $4.99 earns $1.39 at 70% (0.70 × ($4.99 − $3.00)) but $1.75 at 35%.
What to do: compress images before you export, and check the file size KDP reports after upload. If you export from BlurbBio or a free tool like our formatting export, the EPUB of a text-only novel should stay well clear of the threshold. Image-heavy books are where the 35% option sometimes wins.
One note on Amazon's own examples
Amazon's eBook Royalties page uses €0.10 per MB for Spain in a worked example, while the Digital Book Pricing Page lists €0,12 per MB for Amazon.es. We use the pricing page figure, since it is the rate schedule itself.
Worked examples
All US examples assume a 2 MB file ($0.30 delivery) and no sales tax deducted, which is how Amazon's own US examples run. Amazon rounds delivery costs and royalties to two decimals.
A $4.99 novel. 0.70 × ($4.99 − $0.30) = 0.70 × $4.69 = $3.28 per sale. At 35% the same book would earn $1.75.
A $0.99 launch price. Below $2.99, only 35% applies: 0.35 × $0.99 = $0.35. You need about seven $0.99 sales to match one $3.99 sale at 70% ($2.58).
A $10.99 epic fantasy, before and after July 7. Before the change it sat outside the band and earned 35%: $3.85. Now it earns 0.70 × ($10.99 − $0.30) = $7.48.
A $13.99 box set. Still above the band, so 35%: $4.90. At $12.99 it earns $8.88. Pricing one dollar higher costs you almost four dollars a copy.
A German sale at €4.99. Amazon backs out VAT first. Using the 7% German VAT rate from Amazon's own example, that is 7/107 × €4.99 = €0.33. Delivery for 2 MB at €0.12 per MB is €0.24. Royalty: 0.70 × (€4.99 − €0.33 − €0.24) = €3.09. UK ebook VAT has been 0% since May 1, 2020, per the pricing page, so a UK list price is your pre-tax price.
Royalty climbs steadily inside the 70% band, then drops at $13.99 when the book falls back to 35%.
Price matching and "permafree"
Amazon can sell your ebook below your list price. Its pricing page says it may match a lower price from another retailer, for a digital or print edition, or Amazon's own print price. When it does, your 70% royalty is calculated on the matched price, and if the matched price falls below the 70% minimum, you earn 35%.
If your book is free somewhere else, Amazon says "we may also make it available for free," and your royalty during that match is zero. This is the mechanism behind "permafree" first books: authors set book one to free on other retailers and wait for Amazon to match. The key word in Amazon's wording is may. Matching isn't guaranteed, and it can't happen while the book is in KDP Select, because Select requires the ebook to be exclusive to Amazon.
Kindle+ page reads: the other half of the decision
Kindle Unlimited was renamed Kindle+ in late October 2026, and eligible audiobooks joined the subscription, as Written Word Media reported on October 22. Amazon's Kindle+ help page says books enrolled in KDP Select are included automatically.
Enrollment terms, from Amazon's Select enrollment page: a 90-day term during which the ebook "can only be distributed through KDP and public libraries." Print and other formats can still be sold elsewhere.
How page reads pay, from the Royalties in Kindle+ and KENP pages:
- You're paid from the monthly KDP Select Global Fund, based on your share of pages read or listened to.
- You earn the first time a subscriber reads a given page; rereads don't pay.
- Pages are measured in Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP), capped at 3,000 per title per customer.
- The rate is the fund for a marketplace divided by total KENP read there. Amazon announces each month's fund near the 15th of the following month.
Amazon publishes the fund size but not a headline per-page rate. Written Word Media keeps a running list of both: for September 2026, a fund of $65.9 million and a per-page payout of $0.005365. At that rate a subscriber who reads a 300-KENP book to the end earns you about $1.61, roughly half of a $4.99 sale. Longer books earn more per full read, which is one reason word count matters more in Kindle+ than in sales. Amazon's KDP Select page shows a separate headline, $69.3 million in total KDP Select author earnings for September 2026.
The pool that pays Kindle+ page reads has moved within a few million dollars all year.
KDP Select also gives you two price tools. Free Book Promotions let you offer the ebook free "for up to 5 days out of each 90-day KDP Select enrollment period." Kindle Countdown Deals run on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for books priced $2.99 to $24.99 on Amazon.com (£1.99 to £15.99 in the UK) that have been enrolled at least 30 days. If you chose the 70% option, you keep 70% during a Countdown Deal "even if the price is below $2.99."
Whether exclusivity is worth it depends on your genre and catalog. We cover that trade-off in detail in Kindle Unlimited vs going wide.
What readers actually pay
The best recent reader data for indie ebooks comes from Written Word Media's 2026 reader survey of 3,589 readers (published February 2026). The majority spend under $5 per ebook. Median monthly spending on books was $15, and 26% used Kindle Unlimited. That audience skews toward deal-hunting digital readers, so treat it as the floor of the market, not the whole of it.
On the author side, Written Word Media's 2025 indie author survey (1,346 responses) called catalog size "one of the strongest predictors of earning potential," alongside email list size. It found 38% of authors had all their books in KDP Select and 30% had none.
Pricing strategy by situation
First book in a series
BookBub's partner data is the most specific published evidence here. In a post updated July 2026, BookBub reports that partners who make the first book in a series free "see 8x higher sales of the other books in the series" than partners who discount it to $0.99. They also saw a 5x higher increase in series sales when discounting the first book rather than a later one. BookBub doesn't give a date range or sample size for these figures, and they come from authors promoted to its audience, so they describe promotions, not everyday pricing.
Promotion price points
The same BookBub post reports that free promotions bring 10x more downloads than $0.99 promotions. It also reports that $2.99 promotions "generated more than 200% more revenue" than $0.99 ones, despite lower unit sales. BookBub notes that many authors running higher-priced deals already have big brands. An older BookBub stats roundup from January 2016 reported the same direction: over 75% higher volume at $0.99, but 142% more revenue at $2.99.
Standalones and later series books
There is no good public dataset on everyday list prices by genre, so this is practitioner guidance:
- Check your neighbors. Look at the top 20 paid books in your exact Kindle category, note the prices of indie titles, and price inside that cluster.
- Later series books carry the margin. Readers who finished book one are less price-sensitive. Keep books two onward at your genre's full price inside the 70% band.
- Box sets can use the new headroom. A three-book set at $12.99 now earns 70%.
- Change one variable at a time. Hold a new price for several weeks before judging it, and don't change price during a promotion.
A pricing checklist for Monday
- Check your file size on the KDP Bookshelf. If it is large, run the 35% vs 70% comparison in the calculator above.
- Confirm your price sits inside the 70% band in every store you sell in, not only the US; the bands differ.
- If you priced a long novel or box set at $9.99 to dodge the old ceiling, test a higher price.
- If you have three or more books in a series, plan a first-book discount or free run with a promotion behind it.
- Make sure the back matter of book one links to book two. BookBub's data on discounts assumes readers can find the next book.
- Write a blurb that earns the price. Our guide to writing a book blurb covers that, and our series planning guide helps if the series is still on paper.