It's rare to get the 70% royalty, even if a Kindle book is priced under $9.99.
TFA's linked Amazon resource page notes "UK Delivery Costs" are £0.10/MB (it's $0.15/MB in the U.S.), so if a Kindle book has 5 MB of images - not unreasonable for a nonfiction or technical book - that's $0.75 deducted from the royalty, regardless of whether book is priced $2.99 or $9.99.
The idea that Amazon is still charging a "delivery cost" for data as if it's a 2007-era Kindle running on a built in 3G connection is ludicrous. Almost all Kindles use Wi-Fi now. There is no real cost to delivering the ebook data; Amazon never retired the "delivery fee" because it's pure profit on the backs of authors and publishers.
Speaking of publishers: If an author is working through a publisher, the royalty cut will be eroded further. Is your publisher using a distributor for the physical copies, to get into bookstores? Distributors typically take a cut of ebook sales as well, even though they add no value for ebook delivery or placement on Amazon.
Finally, when Apple was lauded for cutting the rate charged to indie developers for app store sales from 30% to 15% in 2020, indie publishers asked for a similar break from Apple for titles sold in Apple Books (formerly iBooks):
"While applauding Apple’s decision to grant a bigger share of its revenue to independent software developers, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), representing more than 3,600 independent publishing companies nationwide, calls on the company to extend the same benefits to authors, publishers, and other small businesses using Apple Books for Authors and other ebook publishing programs."
Apple did nothing. The company still takes 30% for any book sold on its platform.
Wow, that is absolutely fucked. The only way that those delivery costs can actually be costs is if Amazon is delivering every book they sell via satellite. AWS egress fees aren't even this fucked!
Text with a handful of images in it is literally the cheapest thing you can distribute over the Internet. It's the reason why self-hosting a blog or Mastodon instance is even financially viable for most tech-savvy people, and why you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE, Reddit, and Telegram for every YouTube.
Now apply this to the plethora of medical information in the public domain, monopolized by a service that used to have to ship encyclopedic volumes of books to doctors' offices on a yearly basis, now easily downloaded over a weekend.
Be careful though, too much thinking or acting on this subject might get you suicided by the FBI.
I have a very niche, non-technical book in both print and kindle formats. It is Kindle priced at $9.99 and I am paid $6.70 royalties per copy sold. This calendar year 37.4% of sales were Kindle. Lifetime, about 23% are Kindle.
Print charges at Lightning Source have gone up considerably the past two years. In addition, they forced publishers to pay a minimum 30% wholesale discount this past year. Previously, I only paid 26% (most of which I am sure goes to Amazon or other online retailer). I try to keep the print cost to no more than 35% of the list, leaving me 35%. As bricks n mortar stores want a 50% discount at a minimum and also require acceptance of returns, I have never tried that route.
> The idea that Amazon is still charging a "delivery cost" for data as if it's a 2007-era Kindle running on a built in 3G connection is ludicrous. Almost all Kindles use Wi-Fi now. There is no real cost to delivering the ebook data
???
It's not charging the author for the cost incurred to the user, but for the cost incurred to Amazon. It doesn't matter if you have a 10 TBPS per second or are on your phone on edge, Amazon still has to serve the same amount of data to the customer.
$0.15 per MB is huge, I'm not going to deny that, but it's pretty clear it is also a measure to prevent abuse by the authors.
That's not what they were charging the fee for. They were charging the fee to cover each Kindle having an active SIM, which is a fixed cost regardless of the book price. They don't, for example, separately charge a store entry for the cost of delivering the high quality product images; random garbage like that is what their cut is for because it generally scales with the quality of the product.
TFA's linked Amazon resource page notes "UK Delivery Costs" are £0.10/MB (it's $0.15/MB in the U.S.), so if a Kindle book has 5 MB of images - not unreasonable for a nonfiction or technical book - that's $0.75 deducted from the royalty, regardless of whether book is priced $2.99 or $9.99.
The idea that Amazon is still charging a "delivery cost" for data as if it's a 2007-era Kindle running on a built in 3G connection is ludicrous. Almost all Kindles use Wi-Fi now. There is no real cost to delivering the ebook data; Amazon never retired the "delivery fee" because it's pure profit on the backs of authors and publishers.
Speaking of publishers: If an author is working through a publisher, the royalty cut will be eroded further. Is your publisher using a distributor for the physical copies, to get into bookstores? Distributors typically take a cut of ebook sales as well, even though they add no value for ebook delivery or placement on Amazon.
Finally, when Apple was lauded for cutting the rate charged to indie developers for app store sales from 30% to 15% in 2020, indie publishers asked for a similar break from Apple for titles sold in Apple Books (formerly iBooks):
"While applauding Apple’s decision to grant a bigger share of its revenue to independent software developers, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), representing more than 3,600 independent publishing companies nationwide, calls on the company to extend the same benefits to authors, publishers, and other small businesses using Apple Books for Authors and other ebook publishing programs."
Apple did nothing. The company still takes 30% for any book sold on its platform.
Source: https://www.ibpa-online.org/news/541675/IBPA-Calls-on-Apple-...