Kobo royalty calculator
What Kobo Writing Life actually pays you for one sale — from Kobo's own published rate card, not from a number someone copied off a blog.
Questions authors ask
70 % of the list price on an ebook priced at or above the threshold for its currency, and 45 % below it. Audiobooks are 45 % and 35 % on the same two bands. Those are Kobo's published rates, read from Kobo itself and refreshed daily.Source: How to Set the Price — Kobo Writing Life
Because your price is under your currency's threshold. Each currency has its own boundary, and it is a cliff, not a slope: one cent below it you are on 45 %, one cent above it you are on 70 %. On EUR the boundary is 2.99, so €2.98 pays €1.34 and €2.99 pays €2.09 — 56 % more money for one cent of price.Source: Optimize Your Pricing — Kobo Writing Life
It depends on the currency, and Kobo publishes which. In EUR, CHF, AUD, JPY and several others, prices are quoted tax-included; in USD, CAD and GBP they are not. Kobo does not publish a VAT rate per country — an ebook is 5.5 % in France, 7 % in Germany and 21 % in the Netherlands — so this page lets you enter yours instead of inventing one. Your own statement settles it: it carries both a tax-included and a tax-excluded price column.Source: How to Set the Price — Kobo Writing Life
Kobo pays a flat 20 % on a public-domain ebook, with no threshold — the price makes no difference to the rate. On a public-domain audiobook it is 0 %. Almost nobody writes about these two numbers, and they change the arithmetic completely.Source: Public Domain 101 — Kobo Writing Life
A library sale carries its own rate, and Kobo's published rate card does not contain it — so this calculator deliberately does not guess at one. Those lines are identifiable on your statement: the library's name is appended to the title. That is exactly why money already earned should always be read from the statement's own rate column and never from a calculator.Source: OverDrive Distribution — Kobo Writing Life
45 % above the threshold and 35 % below it — and a third rate almost nobody mentions: 32 % when a listener buys the audiobook with a subscription token rather than with money. Audio is also gated per account: if you see no Audiobooks tab on your dashboard, the tool has not been switched on for you yet and you have to ask Kobo for it.Source: FAQ: Audiobooks — Kobo Writing Life
Kobo Plus pays per MINUTE read, not per page and not per sale, and it settles once a month: your share is 60 % of a value-per-minute computed as that month's fund divided by all the minutes read. Kobo does not publish that value anywhere — it appears only on your own statement, and it moves every month. So there is no honest constant to put in a calculator. Kobo also counts 300 minutes as one “read” and counts re-reads, which is why a read is not a reader.Source: How does Kobo Plus pay? — Kobo Writing Life
Nothing directly — and that is exactly why it is invisible. A free download earns no money, so it produces no line on your Kobo statement at all: the statement is a financial document, and a giveaway is not a financial event. Your downloads still exist in Kobo's dashboard, they just never reach the report your accounting comes from. It is not a corner case either: on a real wide account we worked with, thirty days recorded 527 free downloads against 2 paid sales.
One thing this free tool cannot do
It multiplies a published rate by a price you type. It does not know how many copies you actually sold, how many you gave away, or how much you spent on ads to sell them.
TrueRoyalties reads your Kobo statements and your free downloads, puts them next to your KDP royalties and your ad spend, and shows the profit that is left — book by book.