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Kindle Delivery Costs

A unique aspect of Amazon KDP is a “delivery” fee applied each time a reader purchases your book. This fee is deducated from your royalty when you choose the 70% Royalty Option, and is based on the size of the file that is delivered to the reader.

This page describes how you can determine the delivery fee for your ebook, the factors that can increase this fee, and ways you can reduce it.

Determining the Delivery Fee

KDP’s delivery fee is not based on the size of the file you upload. Rather, it’s calculated using a smaller, converted file created by Amazon. To determine the file size and delivery fee, you need to:

  1. Upload your Kindle.epub and cover files to KDP
  2. Navigate to the Kindle eBook Pricing tab
  3. Scroll down to Pricing, royalty, and distribution

There, you should see information that looks like the following:

The KDP Dashboard reporting a file size after conversion of 0.39 MB and delivery of $0.06

In this case, we’ve uploaded an 80,000-word book with these results:

EPUB Size 0.58 MB
KDP Size 0.39 MB
Delivery $.06

Notes:

Factors Affecting Delivery Cost

Specifics of file size and delivery fees will depend on the content of your book, and can be affected by factors including:

More detail about each these factors can be found below:

Word Count

A word count of nearly 80,000, as seen in Vellum

Every book’s delivery fee is affected by word count. The longer your book, the larger the file will be, and that can increase your delivery fee, as demonstrated by these examples:

KDP Size Delivery Change
80k words 0.39 MB $.06
120k words 0.52 MB $.08 + $.02
160k words 0.65 MB $.10 + $.04

This doesn’t mean you need to edit out every word you can, but it is something to consider if you’re publishing a very long book, such as an anthology or a box set.

Images

About the Author page, including an author portrait, as seen on a Kindle Fire

Including images is a great way to add visual interest to your book. Unfortunately, it is also the fastest way to increase the file size — and delivery fee.

As an example, here are numbers for an 80k-word book with:

  • No additional images
  • An author photo in About the Author
  • Author photo and cover images for later books in Also By
KDP Size Delivery Change
Text only 0.39 MB $.06
+ Author Photo 0.49 MB $.07 + $.01
+ Author Photo, 3 Covers 0.79 MB $.12 + $.06

In this example, adding just four images has doubled the delivery fee for the book. You’ll want to keep this in mind as you add images, though there are ways you can reduce their size in your ebook.

Emojis

For Kindle, Vellum converts emojis to small images so that they can be seen on any device. Because these images are so small, using just a few emojis will not typically affect delivery your delivery fee. But using a large number of different emojis can.

This example demonstrates the change to KDP size and delivery fee when adding emojis to an 80k word book:

# KDP Size Delivery Change
(no emojis) 0 0.39 MB $.06
❤️😊 2 0.39 MB $.06 $.00
❤️😊💀🔥👋 5 0.40 MB $.06 $.00
❤️😊💀🔥👋🤩🎉👀🍒💅 10 0.41 MB $.06 $.00
❤️😊💀🔥👋🤩🎉👀🍒💅
🍔🌈🤯☕️👍🍷⛄️💋✌️🤖
20 0.44 MB $.07 + $.01

Images created for emojis are reused, so if you add a ❤️ in one chapter, you can use it again in others without affecting file size.

Reducing Image Cost

Vellum automatically optimizes your images based on KDP’s guidelines and how each image is used in your ebook. Nevertheless, images can be the biggest contributor to delivery costs, and large, detailed ones can take up a lot of space (even when optimized).

Here, then, are some options for reducing the cost of images.

Visible Size

Vellum will resize each image according to how large it appears in your ebook. Reducing the visible size of an Inline Image will also reduce the file size, and can reduce delivery fees.

Size options for an inline image

Kindle Image Sizing

If you have a large number of images in your book, you can adjust how these are optimized using the Kindle Image Sizing control in Generation Settings.

Kindle Image Sizing allows choice of Higher Quality and Smaller Size

The following shows the result of adjusting Kindle Image Sizing for the example from above with four added images:

KDP Size Delivery Change
Higher Quality 0.79 MB $.12
Smaller Size 0.62 MB $.09 - $.03

Note: results will vary and greatly depend upon the specific images used in your ebook.

Excluding Images from Ebooks

The most effective way to reduce the cost of images is to simply exclude them from your book. If your book contains images that aren’t necessary in your ebook edition, you can choose to only include them in print.

To do this, you can make use of Include In controls, available for both Inline Images and Full Page Image elements:

The Include In submenu in an Inline Image’s gear menu

Factors That Don’t Affect Delivery Cost

Not every addition to your book affects the delivery fee. Here are a few aspects that do not:

Text Messages, styled as bubbles, shown in an ebook on an iPhone

CSS Styling

Features like Text Conversations and Drop Caps are styled using a system called CSS. CSS is inherently lightweight, but is also excluded from KDP size calculations, so using these features will not affect your delivery fee.

Text Messages, styled as bubbles, shown in an ebook on an iPhone

Fonts

Fonts, used for features like Chapter Headings and Written Notes, are also excluded from KDP size calculations. Formatting text as a Written Note, or choosing a Style that uses custom fonts won’t increase your delivery fee at all.