- May 29
- 2 min read

How to Calculate Amazon KDP Author Royalty Payments

It can be confusing!

There have been times where I was puzzled on how much I would earn per sale when publishing my books on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Printing costs have also increased over the past couple of years, therefore further confusing the issue.

To assist with calculating author royalties of your book and competitors books on Amazon, I've provided some helpful tips below.

Understanding how to calculate your Amazon KDP royalties depends on a number of factors including:

The listed price of your book
The trim size of your book (eg. 6 x 9 inch)
Page count
Book Type (Paperback, Hardback or Ebook)
Ink type (Black and White, Color or Premium Color)
The Amazon marketplace your book was ordered (eg. US, Australia, Canada, UK etc)

The official split by Amazon is 60% of the book list price. KDP then subtract the printing costs as per details above.

Calculate Your Author Royalty Per Book Sale

Thankfully, there are a handful of very helpful online calculators that will provide a very close estimate of your author royalty. You can play around with various factors including the book type, interior type, Trim size, Amazon Store, page count and the price of your book.

Book Beam provide a free calculator to help determine your overall Amazon Author Royalty.

You can access the free Book Beam calculator HERE.

Calculating the Author Royalties of Books on Amazon KDP

I always find it fascinating to calculate the author royalties of competitors books on Amazon KDP. Some make $1000's per month, others just a few dollars. To determine the overall author royalty, I use two tools in combination.

By using both these tools, I can calculate the overall author royalty.

Step 1.

Find the book you wish to analyze on Amazon. You can use a chrome extension called DS Amazon Quickview or simply click on the book, scroll down and grab the key information as highlighted below.

Step 2.

Plug these details into the Kindlepreneur calculator. This will provide the overall monthly book sales (book copies sold). Highlighted below, you will see that the result was 5,652

Step 3.

Now enter the book details into Book Beam to get the Author Royalty.

Step 4.

Multiply the book sales from calculator 1 x the KDP Author Royalty from calculator two. Eg. 5,652 x $1.92 = $10,851.84 per month as an author royalty

It is important to note that there can be marginal discrepancies in the data and therefore, these calculators should be used as a guide only.

I hope that these two calculators will assit you with calculating KDP author royalties.

If you would like to access additional tools offered by Kindlepreneur, please see the list below.