Amazon KDP for International Authors: How the 70% and 35% Royalty Tiers Work, and What KENP Really Pays

Author: Svetlana Gruzdova — writer (12 books under her own name and more than 100 written for other authors), literary editor, and PR specialist. Updated: July 14, 2026. Topic: publishing and royalties on Amazon KDP. This is not financial or legal advice.

Amazon KDP pays the author 70% of an ebook's list price if the price falls between $2.99 and $9.99 and the sale happens in an eligible country. In every other case, it pays 35%. On the 70% tier, Amazon also deducts a delivery fee — roughly $0.15 per megabyte. Kindle Unlimited runs on a separate track: it pays for pages read, and in 2026 the rate is holding around $0.0043–$0.0048 per page.

What Amazon KDP is

Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is Amazon's self-publishing platform for ebooks and print books. You upload a file, set a price, and collect royalties on every sale.

The ebook royalty rate is not something you get to pick. It's determined by whether your price lands inside the allowed band and whether the book sells in a territory where the higher tier applies.

How the two tiers work: 70% and 35%

The difference between $2.98 and $2.99 is the difference between 35% and 70% on every single sale.

Amazon doesn't let you choose the rate freely — it's tied to price and territory. Under KDP's rules (kdp.amazon.com, ebook royalty help pages), the 70% tier requires a price from $2.99 to $9.99 inclusive, and the sale must occur in one of the eligible countries: the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, or India. Price it below $2.99 or above $9.99 and the book drops to 35% automatically.

Pricing on KDP isn't about "going cheap so people buy." It's about landing inside the band.

The hidden line item: the delivery fee

On the 70% tier, Amazon deducts a file delivery fee — roughly $0.15 per megabyte. On the 35% tier, there's no such fee.

Here's the math that makes the point (per reviews of KDP calculators, kdpeasy.com): a 10 MB book priced at $2.99 earns about $2.04 before deductions; delivery eats about $1.50; you keep roughly $0.54. The same book under one megabyte loses pennies.

For prose, the fix is simple: don't drop full-resolution illustrations into your ebook. A normal novel in clean text weighs less than a megabyte.

Kindle Unlimited: you're paid for pages, not for books

Kindle Unlimited has no fixed price per book. The author is paid for every normalized page read (KENP — Kindle Edition Normalized Pages). Amazon sets a total monthly fund and divides it across all pages read of all books. The rate isn't a posted price — it's whatever's left after the division.

In 2026 the rate has hovered around $0.0043–$0.0048 per page; April 2026 was reported at $0.00482 (per KDP payout trackers: automateed.com, kdptools.io). A novel at 400 KENP pages, read all the way through, brings in roughly $1.70–$1.90.

Kindle Unlimited pays off for authors who get finished — and for authors with a series. If your reader quits on page thirty, you get paid for thirty pages.

What this means if you're publishing in English from another market

Getting onto Amazon from outside the US is genuinely doable, but the wall isn't technical — it's translation and the absence of an English-language audience. You can upload a book in an evening. Selling it is another matter: English-language Amazon is the most competitive book market on earth, and a book with zero reviews is simply invisible there.

The good news: translation now runs through DeepL on an inexpensive subscription, and a cleanup pass can go through a language model with a tight prompt. That removes the biggest cost line.

But publishing in English with no minimum footprint — an author page, a mailing list, five to ten honest reviews — statistically produces no sales.

Amazon is not a way to make money fast. It's a way to get an international storefront and a set of rights you can put on the table in later negotiations.

Checklist before you upload to KDP

• Your ebook price lands in the $2.99–$9.99 band — otherwise the royalty drops to 35%.

• The file weighs less than 1–2 MB; heavy illustrations are compressed or cut.

• The cover is built at the required resolution — at minimum 1600×2560 pixels.

• All seven keywords are filled in and two categories are chosen: they decide whether the book gets found at all.

• You've written a book blurb that sells, rather than recapping the plot.

• You've decided whether you're going into KDP Select (exclusivity plus Kindle Unlimited) or keeping the book on other retailers.

• The W-8BEN tax form is filed — without it you'll be withheld at the higher rate.

• You have a plan for your first ten reviews: who writes them, and when.

Exercise: run the numbers on your own KDP scenario

1. Pick a price inside the band: $2.99, $4.99, or $6.99.

2. Multiply by 0.7 — that's your royalty before deductions.

3. Find your file size in megabytes and subtract $0.15 for each one. That's your honest royalty per sale.

4. Estimate your book's length in KENP: roughly 1.3–1.6 KENP pages per ordinary book page. Multiply by $0.0045 — that's what you make if the book gets finished in Kindle Unlimited.

5. Compare the two numbers. For your book, which pays better: a sale, or a full read-through on subscription?

6. Answer one question in writing: where is your first English-language reader coming from? If you don't have an answer, that's your actual problem — not the price.

Price, tier, and what the author keeps

List price	Tier	Royalty before deductions	Delivery (1 MB file)	You keep
$0.99	35%	$0.35	none	about $0.35
$2.99	70%	$2.09	about $0.15	about $1.94
$4.99	70%	$3.49	about $0.15	about $3.34
$9.99	70%	$6.99	about $0.15	about $6.84
$12.99	35%	$4.55	none	about $4.55

Calculated per KDP's rules (kdp.amazon.com). Note the line that matters: a $12.99 book pays less than a $9.99 book — a direct consequence of the price band.

The contrast is worth sitting with: raise your price by three dollars — from $9.99 to $12.99 — and you lose two. This is the rare case where greed gets punished by arithmetic.

Limits of this advice

Everything above applies to ebooks. Print on demand (KDP Print) works differently: 60% royalty minus the printing cost, which depends on page count and whether you're printing in color.

Tax questions — the W-8BEN, double taxation, how you actually receive payouts — depend on your residency and status. That's a conversation for an accountant, not a literary editor.

KENP rates change every month, so any subscription math is an estimate.

And most importantly: the platform does not solve the problem of not having a reader.

About the author

Svetlana Gruzdova — writer: 12 books under her own name and more than 100 written for other authors. Literary editor, content manager, and PR director.

In the Promotion Strategy service, I break down a marketing plan for both the Russian and the Western market: what to translate, which book to lead with, how to engineer your first reviews, and what to realistically expect from Amazon.

What to do next

Run the checklist against your own manuscript — most authors discover at the file-size and price-band items alone that they'd have been giving up half their royalties.

Then do the exercise and answer step five honestly: where is your first reader coming from?

If you're planning a move into the English-language market and want to know whether your book is worth translating and in what order to do things, you can submit a request on the services page: it lists Promotion Strategy and Manuscript Critique.

You can browse my Russian-language books in the books section. And if you'd rather talk through your path as an author out loud, there's a podcast booking option.

Mini-FAQ

Can an author based outside the US publish on Amazon KDP? Technically, yes: you need an account, a tax form, and a way to receive payouts. The restrictions concern getting the money out and depend on your bank and your residency — check that with an accountant, because the rules move.

Do I have to go into Kindle Unlimited? No. Kindle Unlimited requires ebook exclusivity through KDP Select. It works well for genre fiction with a high completion rate and for series. For a standalone book outside genre, the payoff is far less obvious.

Can I translate a book with AI? For a draft, yes — DeepL and language models give you a workable base for the price of a subscription. But machine-translated text absolutely must be edited by a native speaker or a very strong editor: literary prose gives itself away instantly through rhythm and idiom.