Questions about self-publishing on KDP

Hebrews12

Hi all. I'm getting close to the stage where I want to upload my novel to KDP in oredr to self-publish it but having trawled through endless YouTube videos, it seems such a minefield. I want to have it so that it can be bought for an e-reader and in paperback. I think I've got my head around the paperback side of things in ter,s of pricing and format etc but what do I need to do differently for the e-reader side of things and how on earth do you go about pricing that? Amazon provide a costings chart for paperbacks that help you work out how to price it but I can't see anything for digital books. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Glad

From a relative who did this some years ago

KDP ebooks are actually a bit simpler than paperbacks as there are no printing costs to factor in. You upload a separate ebook file (usually EPUB or a Word document converted by KDP), choose your territories, description, keywords etc much as you do for paperback, then set an ebook price separately from your print price.

On pricing, Amazon doesn’t give a print-style calculator because there’s no per-copy print cost. Instead, you choose a list price and Amazon pays royalties based on that. Broadlu speaking, you’ll usually be looking at either the 35% or 70% royalty option depending on price band/territory.

A lot of self-published authors price first ebooks somewhere around £1.99–£4.99, but it depends on genre, length, whether you're a debut author, and what comparable books in your niche charge.

Don’t panic too much about getting it perfect first time either, andyou can change pricing later if you want to experiment.

Hopefully someone with recent KDP experience will chip in too 🙂