What KDP actually pays you
Royalty is not a percentage of your price. It is a percentage minus a printing bill that grows with every page.
Most people picture book royalties as a slice of the cover price. Paperbacks do not work that way. Amazon prints the copy first, takes the printing cost out, and pays you a share of what is left.
The formula for a paperback sold on an Amazon marketplace:
royalty = (list price x 0.60) - printing cost
Sixty per cent, flat. There is no 70% tier for print — that belongs to Kindle ebooks. The only variation is Expanded Distribution, which sells your book through other retailers and pays 40% instead.
Printing cost is where the book is won or lost
Printing is charged partly as a fixed fee and partly per page. For a black-and-white US paperback at a standard trim size:
| Pages | Printing cost |
|---|---|
| 24–110 | $2.30 flat |
| 111+ | $1.00 + $0.012 per page |
Colour changes the picture completely:
| Ink | Cost per page (standard trim) |
|---|---|
| Black & white | $0.012 |
| Standard colour | $0.0255 |
| Premium colour | $0.065 |
Read those numbers again. A 120-page black-and-white book costs about $2.44 to print. The same book in premium colour costs about $8.80. Nothing else in your publishing decisions moves the economics that hard.
Work it backwards, always
Pick the printing cost first, then find the price that clears it.
A 120-page black-and-white paperback at $9.99:
9.99 x 0.60 = 5.99
5.99 - 2.44 = $3.55 royalty
The same book at $6.99 pays $1.75. Same work, half the money.
And there is a floor. If 60% of your price does not cover printing, KDP will not let you publish at that price at all. That is the real reason a 400-page colour book cannot be a $12 book — not strategy, arithmetic.
Before the next lesson
Take the page count you expect and price it three ways: black and white, standard colour, premium colour. If the colour version needs a price you would not pay yourself, you have just made your first real publishing decision, and you made it before wasting a month on the interior.