Why your 70% Amazon royalty is not 70%, and what the other four stores charge

You priced your ebook at $2.99 and picked the 70% royalty option. Seventy percent of $2.99 is $2.09. Your report says $1.57.

Nothing is broken. Amazon subtracts a delivery cost from every sale on the 70% plan, and it charges that cost by the megabyte. The bigger your file, the less 70% is worth. None of the other four stores publishes a per-megabyte charge at all.

Here is what each of the five actually publishes.

Amazon prices your royalty by the size of your file

Amazon’s royalty page gives the two options as formulas. They are not the same shape.

The 35% option is 35% Royalty Rate x (List Price – applicable VAT) = Royalty. Under it, Amazon says plainly: “Not applicable - we don’t deduct Delivery Costs when calculating your Royalties.”

The 70% option is 70% Royalty Rate x (List Price – applicable VAT - Delivery Costs) = Royalty.

That third term is the one that surprises people. Amazon defines it as “the number of megabytes we determine your Digital Book file contains, multiplied by the Delivery Cost rate listed below”, and the rate depends on the store:

Amazon “will round file sizes up to the nearest kilobyte”, and there is a floor: the minimum is US$0.01 per sale in dollars, £0.01 in pounds, €0.01 in euros, ¥1 in yen, ₹1 in rupees.

Japan has a quirk worth knowing if you sell there. Amazon says “For sales in JPY, we will not deduct any Delivery Cost for books 10 MB or greater.” A big file is charged nothing in Japan and charged the most everywhere else.

The 10 MB crossover

This is our arithmetic, not an Amazon claim, and you can check it against the rates above.

Take a $2.99 book on Amazon.com. US list prices are set without tax, so the VAT term is zero and the sum is just the delivery cost.

At about 10 MB the two options pay the same. Past that, on a $2.99 book in the US, the 70% option pays you less than the 35% option would. Solve it exactly and the crossover is 9.97 MB.

That matters most to the authors least likely to expect it: illustrated books, cookbooks, photo-heavy non-fiction, anything with a lot of images.

Amazon does publish a worked example of its own, for Germany, where VAT is in the list price: “Your Royalty per sale to a German customer from Amazon.de is: 0.70 x (€2.99 - €0.20 - €0.12) = €1.87”. The €0.20 is VAT, the €0.12 is one megabyte.

What Amazon does not tell you

It says “the number of megabytes we determine your Digital Book file contains”. It does not publish how it determines that number, and it is not the figure on your hard drive. Your uploaded manuscript goes through Amazon’s conversion first. Plenty of guides state a compression ratio for this. Amazon does not, so we are not going to either. If you want your real number, the delivery cost is shown per marketplace in the pricing screen before you publish.

Kobo has no delivery cost at all

Kobo pays “70% of the list price for the book (the price the customer pays, not including taxes)” for original works at or above $2.99 USD, and “For original works priced below this threshold, you will receive 45% of the list price.” Public domain works earn 20%.

There is no per-megabyte term anywhere in that calculation. We checked the whole Kobo Writing Life help centre, all 106 articles, not one page: zero mentions of a delivery cost, a delivery fee, a megabyte or a per-MB charge. The same sweep found “royalty” 22 times and “VAT” 33 times, so the search was working.

So Kobo’s 70% really is 70% of the price after tax, whatever your file weighs. On a $2.99 book that is $2.09 whether the file is 1 MB or 30 MB.

Apple talks in proceeds, and the rate is not on a public page

Apple’s published payments guide covers thresholds, currencies, withholding and reporting in detail. It has no delivery cost concept in it at all, and no per-megabyte charge.

What it does not contain is the royalty rate. Apple’s rate lives in the Paid Books Agreement, which is not a public page we can fetch and quote. We are not going to state a number we cannot cite. What we can say is the part that matters for this question: nothing in Apple’s published payments material charges you for the size of your file.

Google Play does not publish one rate, it reports the rate per sale

Google is the odd one out. Rather than publishing a single percentage, its sales report carries a column for it. Google’s own field list describes “Publisher Revenue %” as “The publisher’s percentage of the list price”, alongside “Publisher Revenue”, “The amount of revenue the publisher earned.”

That is a different way to think about it. Your rate is a fact about each transaction, printed in the report, rather than a number you look up once. There is no delivery cost line in that field list.

Draft2Digital publishes a flat table, and it hides the question

Draft2Digital publishes a rate table by store. Amazon is “60% or 30%”, with the note “60% when list price is $2.99-$9.99, otherwise 30%”. Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo are all 60%. Smashwords is “75% or 40%”. Vivlio is 55%.

The table carries its own caveat: “percentages shown are approximations due to rounding and currency exchange rates”.

Here is the part to be careful about. That page says nothing about a per-megabyte deduction, and Amazon’s delivery cost does not disappear because you went through an aggregator. Whether the 60% is taken before or after Amazon’s delivery cost is not stated anywhere on that page. So you cannot work out your Amazon-via-D2D royalty from the table alone, and a big file is exactly the case where the gap would show up. We are not going to guess which way it works. If it matters to your numbers, ask them, and get it in writing.

Put them side by side

A short month end checklist

• On Amazon, check your delivery cost per marketplace on the pricing screen, not your file size on disk.
• If your book is over about 10 MB and priced near $2.99, do the 35% arithmetic before assuming 70% is the better option.
• Do not carry one royalty rate across your whole spreadsheet. Only Kobo has a flat published rate that survives contact with a big file.
• For Google, read the rate off the report rather than assuming one.
• If you distribute to Amazon through Draft2Digital, do not reconcile against 60% of list without checking how delivery cost is handled.

A delivery 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 in this post was taken from the store’s own pages on 25 September 2026 and is linked above. Stores change these pages without notice, so check the source before you make a decision on it.