Publishing on Amazon: File Size vs Pricing


When publishing e-books on Amazon, file size is an important consideration.

Why?

First of all, Amazon charges delivery fees for any books priced $2.99-$9.99 if you've chosen the 70% royalty rate (and even with delivery costs, you generally want to choose the 70% rate).  They calculate your royalty and then subtract the delivery cost, so a big delivery cost can really eat into your profit margin.

Delivery cost depends on file size.  If you're publishing novels or narrative non-fiction without fancy graphics, it's probably not a big problem.  My books of this type have delivery costs of 3-6 cents.  If you're publishing something with photos, illustrations, charts, etc, then you have more to worry about.  My book, Cruising Alaska on a Budget, could easily have had delivery costs above 70 cents, even without putting in all the photos I wanted.  I got it down to 22 cents through photo editing and somewhat complicated computer gymnastics.  I'll detail my process in another post, but that scaling down left me a lot higher percentage of profit.

Even if you choose the 35% royalty rate (or take the mandatory 35% rate for books $0.99-$2.99), you still have to think about file size.

If you want to price your book at 99 cents, your converted file size must be under 3 MB.  My current book, Hiking Alaska from Cruise Ports, is a relatively short book, and it's only 99 cents for its launch.  The file I'd prepared, however, full of pictures of the beautiful trails and stunning views, was bigger than 3 MB.  Despite my publishing experience with KDP, I'd never run into this problem before, and it took me some Googling to figure out why I couldn't price it at 99 cents, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

For more detail, you can read my post on Have Book, Will Travel.

Keep an eye out for my personal file-scaling-down method next time.


Melinda Brasher's fiction appears most recently in Leading Edge (Volume 73) and Deep Magic (Spring 2019).  Her newest non-fiction book, Hiking Alaska from Cruise Ports is available for pre-order on Amazon.    

She loves hiking and taking photographs of nature's small miracles.  

Visit her online at http://www.melindabrasher.com






2 comments:

Karen Cioffi said...

Melinda, this is great information self-publishing with Amazon. Not many know about how file size can eat into your book's profit. I didn't. Thanks for sharing!

deborah lyn said...

Thanks Melinda! This is really helpful info I needed to be aware of since our CreateSpace files were recently transferred to Amazon KDP. Looking forward to your next post. best, deborah

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