KDP-Tantiemen-Rechner

For a Kindle ebook, either 35 % or 70 % of your list price excluding VAT — and on the 70 % option Amazon also deducts a delivery fee based on your file size. For a paperback or hardcover it is 60 % of the list price minus the printing cost, or 50 % if you priced below the store's threshold. The printing cost is the part people forget: it is a fixed amount per copy, so it does not shrink when you lower the price, and it is what makes a cheap print book pay almost nothing.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:KDP royalties overvieweBook royalty optionsPaperback royaltyHardcover royalty

70 %, whenever your price is inside the window Amazon allows for it — on Amazon.com that is $2.99 to $12.99. Outside that window Amazon pays 35 % whether you selected 70 % or not, which is the single most common surprise in KDP. The 70 % option also charges delivery by the megabyte, so for a very large illustrated file the two can come closer together than you would expect: this calculator shows both, with the delivery fee taken out, so you can see the real gap rather than assume it.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:eBook royalty optionseBook list price requirements

Three deductions sit between the two figures. VAT comes off first in stores that charge it on ebooks, so a €9.99 book in Germany is a €9.34 book before the rate is even applied. Then Amazon's delivery fee comes off, charged per megabyte on the 70 % option only. Only then is the 70 % taken. A sale to a customer outside Amazon's 70 % territories pays 35 % as well, whatever your setting.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:eBook royalty optionsDelivery costs and 70 % territories

A fixed amount plus a per-page amount, and the fixed part depends on your store, your ink and your trim size. On Amazon.com a black-ink paperback costs $1.00 plus 1.2 cents a page, so a 300-page book costs $4.60 to print. Below about 110 pages the per-page charge disappears entirely and you pay a flat $2.30 — which is why short and low-content books behave so differently. Colour changes everything: premium colour is 6.5 cents a page, more than five times black ink.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Paperback printing costHardcover printing costAmazon's own printing cost calculator

Because it is below the minimum for your book, and that minimum is not a fixed number — it is worked back from your printing cost. KDP will not let you price a book where your royalty would be negative, so the floor rises with every page you add. A 300-page US paperback costs $4.60 to print, which forces a minimum of $9.20; the same book at 500 pages costs $7.00 and cannot be sold under $11.67. This calculator shows that floor for every store, so you find it before KDP does.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Price troubleshootingPaperback royalty and minimum list price

On Amazon.com, $4.60 — and only for the shortest possible book. The cheapest paperback KDP prints is 24 to 110 pages in black ink at a regular trim, which costs $2.30 a copy, and at the 50 % rate that already forbids any price under $4.60. A $0.99 paperback is not merely unusual, it cannot exist. Every store has its own floor for the same reason.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Paperback printing cost

For a print book, enormously — every page adds to the printing cost, which comes straight out of your royalty. Adding 100 pages to a US paperback costs you $1.20 on every copy sold, for ever. For a Kindle ebook the page count is irrelevant to the royalty: what matters there is the file size, because the delivery fee is charged per megabyte on the 70 % option.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Paperback printing costDelivery costs per megabyte

Because you crossed the band. Print royalties are 50 % below a threshold and 60 % at or above it — $9.99 on Amazon.com, £7.99 on Amazon.co.uk, €9.99 across the euro stores. Moving from $9.98 to $9.99 lifts a typical paperback by around a dollar a copy, which is why pricing a print book just under a round number is usually a mistake. The list of prices in the calculator above shows exactly where your own step falls.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Paperback royalty bandsHardcover royalty bands

Anything wider than 6.12 inches or taller than 9 inches, and Amazon charges more per page for it. The catch is that the rule is about both dimensions: an 8.25″ × 6″ book is shorter than a standard 6″ × 9″ novel and still counts as large, because it is wide. The calculator labels every trim so you can see which side of the line yours falls on before you commit a cover to it.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Paperback printing cost

40 % of the list price minus the printing cost — not 60 %, and not a discount on it. It is a different rate for a different channel, covering bookstores and libraries that order through Amazon's distribution partners. On the $15 paperback Amazon uses in its own example, the normal channel pays $4.00 a copy and Expanded Distribution pays $1.00. It is shown above for every paperback, including when it comes out negative, which happens more often than authors expect. Amazon's own calculator leaves it out entirely.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Expanded DistributionPaperback royalty

Per page read, not per borrow, and the rate changes every month and differs by store. Amazon publishes only the total size of the KDP Select fund and never a per-page rate, so every figure quoted anywhere has to be derived by dividing Kindle Unlimited royalties by pages read — which we do monthly, and which is why this calculator can show what a full read of your book is worth next to what a sale is worth. On Amazon.com it has sat between roughly $0.0040 and $0.0050 a page for years.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Royalties in Kindle Unlimited

No, but it changes the figure the royalty is calculated on. In stores that charge VAT on ebooks, Amazon removes it from the list price before applying your rate, so the customer pays more than the number your royalty is worked out from. The published rates are 0 % in the UK, 7 % in Germany, 5.5 % in France, 9 % in the Netherlands and 4 % in Spain and Italy — with one trap: an Italian Kindle book without an ISBN is charged 22 % instead of 4 %.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:How EU taxes affect eBook list pricesHow EU and UK taxes affect print list prices

Per copy, usually yes, because the higher price more than covers the higher printing cost — but the gap is smaller than the cover price suggests. A 300-page US hardcover costs $9.25 to print against $4.60 for the same paperback, so you need roughly $4.65 more on the price just to stand still. Hardcover is also sold in fewer stores: there is no KDP hardcover in Japan, Canada or Australia at all, which the store list above reflects.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:Hardcover royaltyHardcover printing cost

They are Amazon's own published figures, and the page states the date they were read from KDP's help pages. That matters more than usual right now: on 7 July 2026 Amazon raised the ceiling of the 70 % window on Amazon.com from $9.99 to $12.99, the first change since 2007. Most calculators on the web still carry the old figure, and they will tell an author priced at $11.99 that they earn half what they actually do.

Auf Amazons eigenen Hilfeseiten:KDP royalties overvieweBook list price requirements

It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and the calculation runs entirely on your own device — your price, your page count and your file size are never sent anywhere, and your inputs are remembered only on your own machine so you find them again next time.