Kindle Direct Publishing: 35 or 70 percent? Royalties explained

When publishing an eBook through Kindle Direct Publishing, you have a choice between royalties of 35 and 70 percent. We explain the features of both options.

A calculation with several variables: KDP royalty options are each very specific.

70 percent is more than 35 percent - but deciding which royalty option on KDP is best for you doesn't depend on those numbers alone.

Kindle Direct Publishing: royalty option a matter of strategy

The first difference is that depending on the royalty option, you have different price ranges available for your eBook:

• At 35 percent, your eBook can cost between 0.89 and 215 euros. At 70 percent, it is 2.69 to 9.99 euros.
• The royalty option, however, has nothing to do with the possibility of participating in KDP Select. This is possible in both cases.
• At 70 percent, there are delivery costs that are deducted from your profit. These refer to the file size and are usually in the cent range. For normal eBooks, this point is not too serious; it can be different for works with a lot of image content, where the file size is much larger.

In many cases, authors opt for 70 percent royalties. An argument for the 35 percent, on the other hand, is mainly the fact that lower prices are possible there. This can be decisive, for example, for works that would hardly find buyers with prices from 2.69 euros. In this case, the 35 percent option is the bird in the hand, so to speak. The 35 percent is also interesting for books that you want to sell for more than 9.99 euros, since you would otherwise not be able to exceed the upper limit of the 70 percent option.