Publishing and professional handoff

How to publish a book on Amazon

August 16, 2026 · The StoryProp team

You publish a book on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing: open an account, upload an interior file and a cover, set a list price, press publish. What you earn is fixed by Amazon's published royalty terms — 70% of list price on an ebook priced between $2.99 and $12.99, less a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte in the US, and 35% at any price outside that band. A $4.99 ebook in a 2MB file pays you $3.28 a copy. A 300-page paperback listed at $14.99 pays $4.39. The rest of this article is how to end up on the right side of those numbers.

One of those numbers changed in July 2026, so any guide written before then states the old one. On 7 July 2026 Amazon raised the ceiling of the 70% ebook band from $9.99 — where it had stood since 2007 — to $12.99. Amazon does not migrate existing titles automatically: a book already listed at $10.99 is still earning 35% today, and will keep earning it until its author re-selects the 70% option in the dashboard. At $12.99 that is $8.88 a sale against $4.55. Same book, same price, twice the money, for the sake of one dropdown.

First the account, because the tax interview is worth real money

Two settings inside the KDP account decide whether your royalties arrive intact. The first is the tax interview: US withholding on royalties paid to a non-US author defaults to 30%, deducted before anything reaches your bank. Claiming treaty benefits on Form W-8BEN reduces it — to zero for UK residents under Article 12 of the US-UK treaty, and to 5%, 10% or 15% under others. The second is timing. KDP pays monthly, roughly 60 days after the end of the month a sale is reported, and 90 days for Expanded Distribution; direct deposit has a $0 threshold in every marketplace, while cheques and wires need $100 accrued. A January launch therefore produces no cash until the end of March.

Two royalty options, and the five conditions attached to the good one

The 70% rate is not a rate you pick, it is one you qualify for, and Amazon's published pricing terms set five conditions. The list price must sit inside the 70% band for that marketplace. It must be at least 20% below the Amazon list price of any physical edition of the same book. The title must be available for distribution in every territory where you hold rights. In Brazil, Japan, Mexico and India it must also be enrolled in KDP Select at a qualifying local price. And public-domain titles are paid 35% regardless. The 20% rule runs the opposite way to most people's intuition: a cheap paperback disqualifies the ebook, not the reverse. List the paperback at $11.99 and the ebook must come in at $9.59 or below to hold 70%.

The 35% option looks like the poor relation and occasionally is not. It pays 35% of list price excluding VAT with no delivery cost deducted at all, it applies to customers in any territory, and it is the only route to the $0.99 and $1.99 price points or to anything above $12.99, up to a $200 maximum. Its US minimum prices are tiered by file size: $0.99 for files under 3MB, $1.99 from 3MB to under 10MB, and $2.99 at 10MB and above.

The delivery fee is trivial for a plain-text novel and punishing for anything illustrated, since it comes off list price before the 70% is applied. Amazon's own help pages put typical delivery cost at around $0.06 a unit, which implies a file of roughly 0.4MB — realistic for text fiction, fantasy for a cookbook. Work it through on a 10MB illustrated ebook at $2.99: delivery is $1.50, and 70% of the remaining $1.49 is $1.04. That is an effective 35% of list — exactly what the 35% option pays. The same price on a 0.5MB text file returns $2.04.

Print, and the one cent that triples your royalty

Print is manufactured per order, so there is no inventory to fund, but there is a printing cost and Amazon deducts it after the royalty split rather than before. For a black-ink regular-trim paperback on Amazon.com the formula is $1.00 plus $0.012 a page from 110 pages up, and a flat $2.30 below that. Since 10 June 2025 the print royalty rate keys off list price: 60% at $9.99 and above, 50% at $9.98 and below. That was a cut for cheap print books, and it created a cliff you can fall off by a penny.

Read the first two rows again: one cent of list price multiplies the royalty by 3.6, because below the threshold you pay the printer out of half a book instead of six tenths. The same structure is why long books are hard — printing cost scales with page count while your share of list does not, so an 800-page paperback costs $10.60 to manufacture before you have earned anything. Colour is another planet: premium runs $0.065 a page against $0.012 for black, so a 200-page premium-colour book costs $14.00 to print, not $3.40. The last row is the price of reach — Expanded Distribution offers the paperback to US and UK wholesalers serving bookshops and libraries at 40% of list minus the same printing cost. It needs an ISBN, takes up to eight weeks to become orderable, and excludes hardcovers.

Kindle Unlimited: what the page rate actually pays

Enrolling an ebook in KDP Select buys you Kindle Unlimited and costs you digital exclusivity — a 90-day term, auto-renewing unless you switch it off, during which the ebook cannot be sold anywhere else in territories where you hold rights. Print and audio are untouched. Each term includes five Free Book Promotion days or one seven-day Kindle Countdown Deal, not both, and the Countdown Deal is the only mechanism that holds you at 70% below $2.99.

Inside Kindle Unlimited you are paid per page read out of a monthly pool, not per borrow. The June 2026 US rate was $0.004615 per KENP page, compiled by Written Word Media from Amazon's own monthly announcements; across the first half of 2026 it ran between $0.004202 and $0.004888. A 300-page book read cover to cover pays about $1.38. Only the first read counts — re-reads by the same customer pay nothing — and payment caps at 3,000 pages per title per customer, which bites on box sets. KENP is Amazon's normalised page count, usually higher than your print count, so do not estimate from the paperback.

The pool keeps growing: the KDP Select Global Fund reached $66.9 million in May 2026, the largest month on record, from $2.5 million at launch in July 2014. It cannot tell you per-author earnings: Amazon has never published the number of enrolled titles, so every average-KDP-author figure in circulation rests on an invented denominator. On exclusivity the survey data cuts against the folk wisdom: in Written Word Media's 2025 survey of 1,346 indie authors, 38% had every book in Select and 30% were fully wide, but among authors earning $5,000 a month or more, 43% were all-in on Select and only 15% were wide.

What it costs to reach the upload screen

Amazon's deductions are the ones in the tables above; the spend that shapes your budget happens before you ever see the upload form, and the two best datasets on it disagree. Reedsy's 2026 guide, drawn from more than 230,000 freelancer quotes on its marketplace, puts the all-in cost of editing, cover and formatting for a typical adult title at $2,940 to $5,660. The Editorial Freelancers Association's 2026 rate chart, a survey of what its members charge, lands nearby per word: fiction developmental editing at 3.0-3.5 cents, copyediting 2.0-2.7, proofreading 1.2-2.0 — roughly $2,600, $1,880 and $1,280 on an 80,000-word novel at the midpoints.

Now the other dataset. In Written Word Media's survey, more than half of authors earning under $100 a month spent $0-$100 on editing per book, and even $5,000-a-month earners reported $250 to $1,999 per book — well under the marketplace quotes. Both are true: professionals charge what the chart says, and most authors buy fewer passes or buy them elsewhere. Either way, do the break-even arithmetic first. At Reedsy's low-end $2,940 and a $4.99 ebook earning $3.28, you recoup production at roughly 897 copies; at the high-end $5,660, roughly 1,726. Through Kindle Unlimited at $1.38 a complete read, that is about 2,130 full reads. Those exclude marketing, which scales hard: in the same survey, authors earning under $100 a month spend $81 a month on it, and those over $10,000 a month spend $4,500.

So is it worth writing the book?

Yes, and here is the distribution behind that answer. In Written Word Media's 2025 survey, 44% of respondents earned $100 a month or less from writing, 20% earned $1,000-$5,000, 13% cleared $5,000 and 8% cleared $10,000. The Alliance of Independent Authors' 2025 survey of 1,520 authors, screened for people already doing this as a career, found a median of about $13,500 a year against a mean above $80,000 — a minority takes most of the money. The strongest predictor of which group you land in is not genre or luck. It is catalogue size: around 80% of authors with one to three books earn under $100 a month, while authors with 25 or more report a median around $3,000 a month and over 40% clear $5,000.

That finding should change what you do next, because it says the returns arrive at book five and book ten. The question is not whether book one pays for itself in month one; it is whether you can keep finishing books. One widely repeated number does not survive checking: 'the average self-published book sells 250 copies' has no primary source, and the trail leads back to a Publishers Weekly figure from around 2010 that described traditionally published titles. What is measurable is the field — Bowker registered more than 2.3 million new self-published ISBNs in the US in 2021, and even that undercounts, because a Kindle ebook needs no ISBN at all. The gatekeeper no longer decides whether your book exists; being found is the whole problem now.

The upside is real and it usually arrives sideways. Andy Weir self-published The Martian on Kindle at $0.99 in 2011, earning about $0.35 a copy on the 35% option, and sold roughly 35,000 copies in its first months — around $12,000 in KDP royalties. The listing did not make him rich. It made him findable, and Crown bought print rights and reissued the book in 2014. That is the shape of the opportunity: a listing that puts a finished book in the same store as everybody else's, where a reader, an agent or a producer can trip over it.

Every figure here assumes the one input the upload form cannot supply: a finished manuscript you are willing to show strangers. That is where the attrition happens, long before trim sizes and price bands. If the draft is in pieces, the work is finishing it and then revising it into something you would defend in public — which is what AI book writing software is for. Get that far and the rest of this article is administration: an account, two files, a price band you now understand, and a royalty you can calculate before you press publish.

KDP asks you for two files and a price, and the price you can decide this afternoon. StoryProp is the project-aware writing agent for the harder half: drafting and revising the manuscript itself in pieces, with every decision you have agreed written down where the agent reads it before it writes. Finish the book and the royalty tables turn into arithmetic.

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