Earning Passive Income From Selling e-books

Amazon Ebooks

Amazon KDP/ebook selling is a very nice way of making passive income selling online without setting up your own e-commerce store. For first-time readers on the site and for people who don’t know what Amazon KDP means, Amazon KDP means Amazon Kindle direct publishing which is a kind of platform that helps people publish and market their digital books directly market to readers. Now, Amazon being an e-commerce site charges certain fees for listing a book for sale on their site just like any other e-commerce site.

Just like setting a price for any merchandise, setting a cost price for Kindle books or e-books on Amazon depends on your expenses. But in order to get your profit you need to calculate the commission or the price Amazon charges per sale off your ebook. Amazon charges or commissions vary depending on size of documents and listing price.

But there are little tricks used in order to avoid Amazon charges in order to make your book affordable and still get a decent profit on it. But first let us calculate the cost of selling an eBook on Amazon before before dealing with the tricks in reducing charges and fees.

  • Each Megabyte of the file size of your e-book costs $0.15.
  • The delivery fees depend on the country.
  • For each book sold within the price range of $2.99 $9.99, there is a minimum fee of $0.01.
  • Amazon does not charge delivery fees for books below $2.99 and above $9.99.

Take for instance, your e-book contains just 90,000 characters. After uploading the book, it shows say 1 MB, multiply 1(mb) by 0.15(delivery fee per 1mb) gives you the delivery fee for that book which will be $0.15.

below is the image of Amazon delivery fee page for different countries;

Avoiding Amazon E-book Delivery Cost

For sellers of eBooks on Amazon, the best and only option of getting rid of exorbitant delivery cost where large book sizes need to be uploaded is to go with the 35% royalty. To short ebook writers it may not sound as a nice idea but to authors or sellers who upload and books publish lend e-books in the health, travel, technology niche,it is a great option.

using the KDP on-site price calculator will also help authors know the delivery fee of their ebooks noting that digital books between $2.99 to $9.99 Dollars are not subject to the delivery fees.

Amazon ebook Royalty Rates

70% Royalty

Amazon takes 30% of the selling price of the digital book and gives the author 70%

35% Royalty

Here Amazon takes a whooping? No! 65% of the digital book’s selling price and gives the author 35%. This is usually used buy authors who upload books of large sizes which are usually above $9.99 in order to beat the delivery cost.

Amazon commission and delivery cost rates for each country is detailed here