Self-publishing royalty calculator
The calculator shows what you get from one copy sold on Amazon KDP and similar stores, and puts the two royalty rates side by side — the low one and the high one. That is the main comparison on this page: the high rate looks twice as good right up to the moment you remember the file delivery cost and the price window outside of which you simply will not be given that rate. The second result is the number of copies you have to sell to get back the money spent on the cover, the editing and the layout. That figure, not the royalty percentage, decides whether the book makes economic sense in your case.
Your book
Platform terms
Platforms change these numbers without notice, so they are plain input fields here rather than constants in the code. Check them against the terms page of your store before you calculate, and fix anything that does not match.
What you get
Fill in the price and the platform terms, and the calculation appears here.
Royalty breakdown
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| The table appears once you enter a price. | |
Every number above is the store's published formula applied to your inputs. It promises no sales: you set the number of copies per month yourself, and that is what drives the income, not the royalty on a single copy.
Your book and cost data never leave the browser: the calculation is local, nothing is sent and nothing is stored.
Why 70 percent is not always more than 35
The low rate is taken from the full list price and subtracts nothing. The high rate first subtracts the file delivery cost — the size of the book in megabytes multiplied by the rate per megabyte — and only then takes its percentage. That gives a simple threshold. The two rates are equal when the price equals the delivery cost multiplied by the high rate and divided by the difference between the rates; for the classic 35 and 70 percent that is exactly twice the delivery cost. Anything cheaper than that point pays more on the low rate. For a two-megabyte book at 0.15 per megabyte the delivery cost is 0.30 and the break-even price is 0.60. So for plain text the high rate wins almost every time. An illustrated 40-megabyte book, though, costs 6.00 in delivery alone, and the break-even price jumps to 12.00 — above the whole price window. Print works the other way round: there is no delivery cost, but there is a printing cost — pages multiplied by the price per page, plus a fixed part. It is subtracted after the platform has already taken its percentage, so a thin book at a low price slips into a negative royalty easily.
The 2026 benchmarks, and why they are fields rather than constants
The default values in the “Platform terms” fields match how Amazon KDP published its rules at the time of writing: 35 and 70 percent, a high-rate window of roughly 2.99 to 9.99 dollars, a delivery cost of about 0.15 per megabyte, and 60 percent for print. But the platform changes these numbers without notice, and the price window also differs from one store country to another. That is why they are plain input fields here: open the terms page of your store, check them and fix them. A calculator that pretended to know today's Amazon terms would lie to you after every rate update. The one-time costs are worth estimating honestly too. A decent cover costs 100 to 400 dollars, editing a mid-length text starts at 300, layout starts at 100. The six hundred dollars in the example is a modest set, not an inflated one. Returns and discounts for an ebook usually stay within a few percent; for print they can be noticeably higher.
What the calculator does not do
It does not forecast sales. The number of copies per month is your own assumption that you typed in; the tool only multiplies the royalty by it. No formula knows how many books your reader will buy. It does not know today's rates in your store. Every platform term here is an input field with a default value that you need to check before you calculate. It does not calculate royalty tax, treaty withholding or payout fees. That is a separate subject, and a very different one from country to country. And it does not convert currencies. The selector only chooses a symbol — dollar, pound and euro are printed before the number, hryvnia and zloty after it — so enter the book price and the platform terms in one currency, otherwise the result is meaningless.