Amazon KDP Book Pricing Calculator

• Self-publishing on Amazon and want to know how much you'll make?

• Want to find out how much it'll cost you to print your books?

• Though you can always change your price, it's an important part of getting sales, so don't skimp on this step.

Log into www.kdp.amazon.com and sign into your account to access. They actually have a calculator that you can use to get this information. Once logged in, there is a link that says tools and resources. KDP does a fabulous job of having tons of help - articles of that sort and ways to contact them. So definitely be sure to check those out. Go to printing cost and royalty calculator, and then go where it says, use our calculator.

They have recently added hardcovers to KDP, and they're a great option if you want to give folks a hardcover of your book. Once you reach the calculator, you are going to pick what your book's going to look like on the inside. The exterior cover of your book doesn't really matter when it comes to the cost of printing. It's really just the interior of your book -

• Color or black and white pages

• How many pages it has

• Where you're selling it

• How much you've chosen to sell it for.

They have different page color options for the interior. If I'm doing black and white, I can do white paper or cream paper, and then I can also do premium color and standard color.

Of course, premium color is going to be more expensive. But sometimes, it's just good to see what your options are. That will help you know how much to price your book and or to decide whether or not you should have options that are in color.

Let's say my book is 150 pages, and I'm in the United States. I'm going to leave it as Amazon.com and then let's say, I want to sell it for $12.99. What this is going to do is it's going to tell me your book will be sold on Amazon for $12.99 - that's the price that you have requested. The first one is the minimum amount that you can list it for because they have to make sure they're able to cover the printing costs and then also to give you something.

The percentage that they take is a bit of a hot topic in the author community. Amazon does take 40% of your book cost. However, that's being used to place your book on Amazon. People can use Amazon prime to purchase it so that you can use those internal keywords - those categories to get your book found. They also do other things like follow up emails to people who purchase your book, to ask them to leave reviews. When you think about it, Amazon is literally one of the largest countries in the world and they ship to tons of countries. If you're still reading here, you're likely already going to be using Amazon, so it's something to consider.

Let's say you didn't want to do $12.99, but you wanted to make it cheaper, that's the lowest amount you put. The printers that are selected by Amazon will be located generally near where you are. For example, I'm at Georgia and my books shipped from South Carolina, which is just one state over, this is the amount that it would cost you as the author to print. Let's say you wanted to order some of your books. You wouldn't pay this $12.99, you would just pay this $2.65. They're also giving you a huge discount on printing, which is nice as well.

You could then charge folks, whatever you wanted to charge them for your books after you purchased them. And, that's another way to make money too, if you wanted to sell your books on your own website. Keep in mind though, of course you wouldn't want to sell it too much higher than what you have it on Amazon, because people could clearly just go get it off of Amazon.

Last part, which is probably the part you are wanting to know the most about and why you've chosen to finish this blog. The estimated royalty is how much you would get paid per book. Every book that's sold for $12.99, you would get $5 and 4 cents. That would be calculated times the number of books you've sold in a month and that would be the amount that gets deposited into your account.

This is something to play around with, and just kind of consider. Let's say, if we did premium color. The highest option, if we did that - we tried to sell it for $12.99. Notice that's not enough for us to make any money off of it. So our minimum price would have to do it at $18. Let's say we make this $1.25, it's going to cost $11.35 to print. That means we're only getting a little over three and a half dollars. This is just something to kind of play around with and decide whether or not you want to do black, and white, do color. Maybe you want to knock it down to just standard color and see how it is. Remember, you're making more than double when you use standard color than what you would if you did premium color. Also, the printing cost goes down as well.

This is just something to consider and play around with and to decide how much to price your book for as well as how much to sell it for.