Updated April 2026
Same book, four platforms, very different paychecks. Enter your book's details and see what you'd actually earn on each.
Every platform calculates royalties differently. "Royalty rate" alone is misleading — what matters is what you actually keep after fees, discounts, and print costs come out. Here's the math for a typical paperback:
60% of list price minus print cost. Massive marketplace, smallest margin.
Wholesale discount (typically 55%) minus print. The bookstore distribution play.
You set revenue above print cost on the marketplace. Solid colour quality.
Zero commission. Price minus print only. You bring the traffic, you keep the margin.
Based on a $19.99 paperback, 200 pages, B&W interior. Try your own numbers above ↑
KDP Print: (price × 0.6) - print cost. Print cost: B&W $0.85 + ($0.012 × pages), Colour $0.85 + ($0.065 × pages).
KDP Ebook: 70% tier ($2.99–$9.99): (price × 0.7) - ($0.06 × MB). 35% tier: price × 0.35.
IngramSpark: price - (price × 0.55) - print cost. Print: B&W $0.90 + ($0.013 × pages).
Lulu: price - (price × 0.5) - print cost. Print: B&W $1.00 + ($0.015 × pages).
Books.by: price - print cost. Print: B&W $1.26 + ($0.016 × pages), Colour $1.379 + ($0.036 × pages).
All figures are estimates. Actual costs vary by marketplace, trim size, and region.
Books.by is a direct-sales platform built for self-published authors. Instead of paying commission on every sale, you pay one flat annual fee and keep the rest.
Every Books.by store comes with a custom URL (books.by/yourname), print-on-demand fulfilment through the same Ingram network the big publishers use, a free ISBN, and a built-in author page. Customers buy directly from you. No Amazon middleman, no algorithm to please.
The trade-off is real: Books.by has no marketplace. There's no "browse" tab, no recommendation engine pushing your book to strangers. You bring the readers. From your newsletter, your social bio, your podcast, your speaking gigs. Books.by makes sure you keep what they pay.
Selling 100 copies of a $19.99 paperback through Amazon KDP versus Books.by isn't a small difference. It's a different career.
At 500 sales/year that gap becomes $2,950+. At 1,000 sales/year, it's nearly $6,000. Every year, on the same book, with the same effort to drive traffic. The only difference is who you sent the buyer to first.
Amazon's value is its marketplace. When a stranger searches "cozy mystery" and finds your book, that sale only happens because Amazon exists. You earn less per copy, but you couldn't have earned anything otherwise. KDP is the right answer for marketplace traffic.
But the readers you bring yourself? Newsletter subscribers, podcast listeners, people who clicked your social bio? They don't need Amazon. Sending them to KDP means handing Amazon 56% of the price for routing a sale that was already yours. Books.by exists for exactly that traffic.
Most successful indie authors don't pick one platform. They route different traffic to different places. Here's the standard playbook:
Send subscribers to your books.by store first. They came from your email. Amazon didn't earn that sale.
Replace the Amazon affiliate link with your books.by URL. Same buyer intent, ~67% more royalty per sale.
"Where can listeners buy your book?" Send them to a memorable books.by URL, not amazon.com/dp/B0XXX.
Every Books.by sale gives you the buyer's email address. Amazon never does. A 1,000-name buyer list is worth significantly more than the per-sale margin difference long-term. That's your book 2 launch list, your audiobook upsell, your course pre-sale audience.
Keep KDP for what it does best: Amazon discovery traffic from people you'd never reach otherwise. Use Books.by for everything else: traffic you sourced, audience you built, readers who already know your name.
One flat annual fee. No add-ons, no per-book costs, no transaction fees on top. Here's what's included:
Authors who route just a fraction of their traffic through Books.by recoup the $99/yr in their first week. Try it for 100 days. Full refund if it's not right.
Start Your Books.by Store — $99/yr →Authors who think about platforms as mutually exclusive are leaving money on the table. The real question is: where are your readers coming from?
Most successful indie authors use KDP for Amazon discovery traffic and Books.by for their owned audience. The calculator above shows you the maths for your specific book. Plug in your numbers and see where the crossover point is.
For a deeper dive on pricing strategy by genre, see our book pricing guide. For a full platform breakdown, check the platform comparison.
KDP Print royalties are 60% of your list price minus printing cost for books sold on Amazon. For expanded distribution, it drops to 40% minus printing cost. KDP's B&W printing costs start at $0.85 fixed plus $0.012 per page for US-printed books. So a 200-page book at $19.99 earns you about $8.74 — roughly 44% of the cover price, not the "60%" Amazon advertises.
Books.by takes zero commission. Your royalty equals your retail price minus the printing cost. On a $19.99 paperback with 200 pages, you'd earn approximately $14.65 per sale. Books.by charges $99/year for the platform subscription — no per-sale percentage, no hidden fees.
For direct sales (you drive the traffic), Books.by pays the most because it takes 0% commission. For marketplace discovery sales (customers find you via Amazon search), KDP is unmatched in volume. Most serious indie authors use both — KDP for Amazon traffic, Books.by for direct traffic from their email list, social media, and website.
Yes, technically — but it's fixed, not per-sale. If you sell 100 books at $14 royalty each, that's $1,400 minus $99 = $1,301. You'd need to sell roughly 7 books to cover the annual fee. After that, every sale earns significantly more than it would on any commission-based platform. The calculator above includes the subscription cost in the annual projections.
Very. Ebooks have no printing cost, so the margin structure is entirely about the platform's commission. KDP takes 30% (or 65% below $2.99/$9.99+). Books.by takes 0% — you keep the full price minus standard credit card processing (2.9% + $0.30). Toggle "Ebook" in the calculator to see the difference for your price point.
Books.by is the only platform where your royalty equals your retail price minus print cost. $99/year for everything — no commissions, no per-sale fees.
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