“The Delivery Costs for a Digital Book will be equal to $0.15 multiplied by our determination of the number of megabytes your Digital Book file contains, once uploaded by you and converted by us into our then-current Digital Book format. One megabyte equals 1024 kilobytes. One kilobyte equals 1024 bytes. We will round file sizes up to the nearest kilobyte. The minimum Delivery Cost for a Digital Book will be $0.01 regardless of file size.

For instance, in the US Kindle Store, if your book has a file size of 0.400 megabytes and a List Price of $8.99, the Delivery Cost will be $0.06 (0.400 MB x $0.15 = $0.06), and your Royalty will be $6.25 (($8.99 – $0.06) x 70 percent = $6.25).

The royalty calculation is as follows:  Equal to 70 percent of the amount equal to the applicable List Price for the Digital Book less the Delivery Costs (as defined above) for the Digital Book. But if we sell the Digital Book at a price below the List Price to match the price at which a third party sells any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book or to match the price at which we sell any physical edition of the Digital Book, the Royalty will be equal to 70 percent of the amount equal to the price at which we sell the Digital Book less the Delivery Costs for the Digital Book.

This can be further illustrated in the link below:

http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200634500

Note: Because List Price, File Size, Offer Price, and Delivery Charge can all change at any time, copies of the same book sold throughout the course of one week may have had different values for each of these attributes in your royalty reports. Therefore, average values are displayed in your reports. 

Delivery costs apply only to the 70% royalty option and are not subject to our 35% royalty option.  Additional information regarding royalty report criteria can be found in our Help pages:

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200641170

I hope this information is helpful.  Thank you for using Amazon KDP.

———-

That was the end of their response. So, a key element of your book’s royalties is its’ total file size, which is mainly a function of how large your images are. Note the following limits:

“Digital books with a file size greater than 3 megabytes up to 10 megabytes must also have a list price of at least $.99, and digital books with a file size of 10 megabytes or greater must have a list price of at least $2.99.”

Source: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A36BYK5S7AJ2NQ

So, if I’m figuring correctly, my book, “Twilight for Life”, which is 5 MB (5 x $0.15 = $0.75), and since the percentage is calculated AFTER the delivery fee is subtracted from the purchase price, the royalty would be calculated as follows:

2.99 price – 0.75 delivery fee = 2.24 subtotal x .70 percentage = $1.568 royalty.

Or, rather, that would be the royalties, if Twilight readers were more interested in the metaphorical parallels of heroes’ journeys and the challenges we face IRL, than they apparently are. ;-)

Amazon’s format isn’t proprietary; the spec is published. It predates ePub quite significantly, and they are technically almost identical. You can set free titles on Amazon and they neither encourage nor discourage you to use DRM. It’s a choice they leave up to you, with no default.

Smashwords like to present themselves as an angel, but they’re really not.

Yuck, this isn’t the first time I’ve bumped into this insouciant crap from major players.

I’ve got a self-published book up on Amazon (Singularity sci-fi, CC-licensed), and they’ve been taking $0.08 from each sale.  Not enough to worry about, and yet I still feel a bit ripped off if they’re charging this for wifi delivery.

On an unrelated note, I know Amazon starts giving away ebooks for free if they find out it’s being given away free elsewhere, but I’ve asked around and nobody seems to be sure what will trigger that.  Has anyone gotten bitten by this for giving away the book on their personal site?

Let’s say an 18MB file takes 2 seconds to encrypt (that’s a conservative estimate).  You can buy an hour of computing time on Amazon’s EC2 for 8 cents.  Ignoring that Amazon can probably get a discount on EC2  time, the cost of encrypting an 18MB file is approximately $0.00004.  (or 4 cents for each thousand books sold).

Not worth considering.

It sounds like what’s happening is, Amazon is offering free 3g to Kindle owners on the backs of authors. In effect, Amazon got a free boost in Kindle marketshare (free 3g is a fairly big differentiator) by taxing the authors of the content it is selling. That is a dirty tactic.

Amazon, on the other hand, forces you to use their proprietary format, ensuring your purchases can only be read on Kindle, and they encourage (if not require) DRM. And you can’t set free titles.

Smashwords distributes to many other (smaller) retailers and keeps less in commission than B&N, Kindle, and iBookstore. You can make your books DRM free, and you get the same cut no matter where you set your price. And you can post it for free.

Plus, when PayPal got all shitty with the erotica/pr0n rules, Smashwords fought back in support of their authors and won.

Smashwords is terrific, and Amazon is the shadiest bastard on the block

Also, their 15% is above any vendor charges, 

What would be nice to know is how the ratio between books delivered on 3G vs. wifi (which is cheaper for Amazon to deliver, as they don’t have to pay for the “last mile” connectivity between your router and the Kindle device) has changed over the years since the Kindle was introduced, and whether or not Amazon has changed its fees since then to adjust. 

I don’t think I’m going to hold my breath waiting for those stats (Amazon still hasn’t released stats on Kindles sold, have they?), but it’d be interesting.