Why your 60% print royalty is not 60%, and how to check the number yourself
Amazon takes the whole printing cost out of your share of a paperback or hardcover, not off the top. That turns a 60% rate into about 23% to 27% of the list price. Here is Amazon's own formula, its own printing cost tables, and the arithmetic worked through so you can check your own report.
09/27/2026
You priced your hardcover at $25, you picked the 60% royalty rate, and 60% of $25 is $15. Your report says $5.75.
Nothing is broken, and nobody has taken a cut they should not have. Amazon prints each copy when someone orders it, and it takes the cost of that printing out of your share. Not off the top, and not split with the retailer. Out of yours.
That one detail is the whole difference between the rate you picked and the money you got.
Amazon’s print royalty has two parts, and only one of them is a percentage
Amazon states the formula the same way for paperbacks and for hardcovers:
(Royalty rate x list price) – printing costs = royalty
The rate is 50% or 60%, and which one you get depends only on your list price. For hardcovers Amazon says “Your royalty is either 50% or 60%, depending on your list price. We then subtract printing costs”.
On Amazon.com the line sits between two adjacent prices:
| Marketplace | 50% at or below | 60% at or above |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon.com | 9.98 USD | 9.99 USD |
| Amazon.co.uk | 7.98 GBP | 7.99 GBP |
| Amazon.de, .fr, .it, .es, .nl, .ie, .com.be | 9.98 EUR | 9.99 EUR |
| Amazon.ca | 13.98 CAD | 13.99 CAD |
| Amazon.com.au | 13.98 AUD | 13.99 AUD |
A one cent price change can move your rate by ten points. That part is worth knowing, and it is also the part people already expect. The printing cost is the part that surprises them.
The printing cost is a fixed fee plus a charge per page
Both of Amazon’s printing cost pages open with the same sentence: “KDP prints your book on demand and subtracts your printing costs from your royalties.” The formula is:
Fixed cost + (page count * per page cost) = printing cost
What moves it, in Amazon’s words: “Printing costs vary depending on trim size, page count, ink type (black ink or color ink), and paper type. Bleed settings and cover finish don’t affect printing cost.”
Here are the black ink figures for the US marketplace, regular trim size:
| Book | Fixed cost | Per page |
|---|---|---|
| Paperback, 24 to 110 pages | 2.30 USD | None |
| Paperback, 110 to 828 pages | 1.00 USD | 0.012 USD |
| Hardcover, 75 to 108 pages | 6.80 USD | None |
| Hardcover, 110 to 550 pages | 5.65 USD | 0.012 USD |
Two things fall out of that table straight away.
A short paperback has no per page cost at all. Amazon notes that black ink paperbacks in the 24 to 110 page band “only incur the fixed cost”. Under about 110 pages, adding pages does not cost you anything per copy.
A hardcover starts a long way behind a paperback before a single page is counted. In the per page bands the fixed cost is $5.65 against $1.00, a gap of $4.65 on every copy, and that is before either book’s pages are charged for.
Large trim sizes cost more per page. Amazon defines large as more than 6.12 inches wide or more than 9 inches tall, and for a 110 to 550 page black ink hardcover the per page cost goes from 0.012 to 0.017 USD. On a 400 page book that is two dollars a copy for a choice made in the setup screen.
Work it through once and you will trust your report
Amazon publishes a worked example for a paperback. List price $15, a 333 page regular trim paperback in black ink sold on the US marketplace:
You can rebuild that $5.00 from the table above, which is a good way to check you are reading it right. A 333 page paperback is in the 110 to 828 band, so it is the fixed cost plus the per page cost times the page count:
$1.00 + (333 x $0.012) = $1.00 + $3.996 = $4.996
That is the $5.00 Amazon uses in its own example, which is a good sign you are reading the right band and the right column.
The hardcover side works the same way. Amazon’s own printing cost example is a 300 page regular trim hardcover in black ink on the US marketplace:
$5.65 (fixed cost) + (300 [page count] * $0.012 [per page cost]) = $9.25 (printing cost)
Put that into the royalty formula with a $25 list price and you get the number from the top of this post:
(0.60 x $25) - $9.25 = $15.00 - $9.25 = $5.75
So what percentage are you actually getting
This is the useful way to look at it. Take the royalty and divide it by the list price:
| Book | List price | Rate you picked | Printing cost | Royalty | Share of list price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 333 page paperback | $15.00 | 60% | $5.00 | $4.00 | about 27% |
| 300 page hardcover | $25.00 | 60% | $9.25 | $5.75 | 23% |
| 333 page paperback, Expanded Distribution | $15.00 | 40% | $5.00 | $1.00 | about 7% |
The 60% is real. It is just 60% of the list price, with a per copy manufacturing bill taken out of it afterwards. On these two examples the rate you chose lands about 33 to 37 points lower by the time it reaches you.
The third row is the one to sit with. For paperbacks, Amazon says that with Expanded Distribution enabled “the royalty is 40% of the book’s list price effective in the distribution channel at the time of purchase minus printing costs”, and gives the example (0.40 x $15) - $5.00 = $1.00. Same book, same printing cost, and the printing cost is now eating most of a much smaller share. The longer the book, the worse that gets, because the printing cost does not shrink with your rate.
Why Amazon will not let you price a long book cheaply
Once you understand that the printing cost comes out of your share, the minimum list price stops looking arbitrary. Amazon puts it plainly: “KDP uses a minimum list price to ensure the royalties you earn are always enough to cover the cost to print your book. The minimum list price is calculated based on your book’s printing cost.”
A 500 page hardcover costs $5.65 + (500 x $0.012) = $11.65 to print. At 60%, you would need to list it above $19.42 just to reach a royalty of zero. That is why the floor moves with your page count, and why it is higher than you expect on a long book.
Two places Amazon’s own bands do not quite meet
If you are building a spreadsheet, do not build it on the band edges.
The paperback bands are written as 24 to 110 pages and 110 to 828 pages, so 110 appears in both, and Amazon’s table does not say which one applies at exactly 110. The hardcover bands are written as 75 to 108 pages and 110 to 550 pages, so 109 pages is in neither.
We are not going to guess. Amazon shows your actual printing cost in the Rights & Pricing section of title setup, and publishes a Printing Cost & Royalty Calculator. If your book sits near a boundary, read the figure off your own screen and use that.
Two more things that move the number and are not in the tables above. Groundwood paper is cheaper: Amazon notes that groundwood “printing costs per page are approximately 5% lower than cream and white paper with black and white ink”. And colour ink is a different table again, which we have not reproduced here because it has more bands than it has useful generalisations.
Print is not ebook, and the formula is genuinely different
If you publish both, do not carry one mental model across.
On an ebook, the deduction that catches people is Amazon’s delivery cost, which is charged by the megabyte and only applies on the 70% option. We wrote that one up separately in why your 70% Amazon royalty is not 70%, including what the other four stores charge, which is nothing per megabyte.
On print, there is no megabyte charge, because there is no file being delivered. There is a physical book being manufactured, and the bill for manufacturing it comes out of your percentage. A 400 page paperback and a 40 page paperback can carry the same ebook royalty and wildly different print royalties.
A short checklist before you price a print book
- Read your printing cost off the Rights & Pricing screen for the specific trim size, paper and ink you actually chose, not from a remembered figure.
- Check where your list price sits against the 9.98 and 9.99 line on Amazon.com. One cent is worth ten points.
- Divide your expected royalty by your list price. That number, not the 60%, is what you are really earning per copy.
- If you turned on Expanded Distribution, run the 40% arithmetic separately. It is a different number, not a rounding difference.
- Before you add pages, check whether you are about to cross out of the fixed cost only band.
- Check the per page cost for large trim before you choose a trim size. It is a permanent per copy decision.
A printing cost is one of several reasons the money you expected is not the money you got. Payment timing, returns landing in a later month, currency conversion, tax withholding and thresholds all do it too, and we wrote up the schedules and the traps store by store in when each store actually pays you.
We are building a local first desktop tool that does this monthly reconciliation for you, using the stores’ own numbers, with nothing leaving your computer. You can see what it does and where it is up to on the Royalty Desk page.
Every quote and every figure in this post was taken from Amazon’s own KDP help pages on 27 September 2026 and is linked above. All figures are the US marketplace in black ink at regular trim size unless stated otherwise. This post covers Amazon print only. Amazon changes these pages and these rates without notice, so check the source before you make a decision on it.