How to Sell on Amazon KDP in 2026 (Setup to Royalties)

To sell on Amazon KDP, you open a Kindle Direct Publishing account, add your tax and bank details, upload a manuscript and a cover as an eBook, paperback or hardcover, choose three categories and up to seven keywords, set a list price and publish. KDP says the book is typically live within three business days, prints paper copies as they are ordered, and pays royalties about 60 days after the end of each month. None of that decides whether the book earns anything. The niche you pick before you write does.

Checked October 2026 against KDP's help pages: Create a KDP Account, Create a Book, eBook Royalties, eBook List Price Requirements, Paperback Royalty, Paperback Printing Cost, the Content Guidelines, Timelines and When will I get paid?. Royalty figures are our arithmetic on those published rates for Amazon.com.

This guide is for someone publishing a first book, or a first few, and wanting the real mechanics with the expectations left intact. A book is one kind of digital product among many; if you have not chosen a format yet, our guide to creating a digital product compares them and covers validation before you commit weeks to a manuscript.

How to sell on Amazon KDP: the system end to end

Everything on KDP runs through one screen, the Bookshelf, and every title passes through the same three stages: details, content, then rights and pricing. The work that matters sits before and after that form.

KDP for beginners: what it is and what it costs

Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon's self-publishing service. You upload files; Amazon lists the book, takes payment, delivers the eBook or prints and ships the paper copy, and pays you a royalty. KDP's own description is free tools to self-publish, with ownership of the content and control of the list price staying with you.

Print books cost nothing in advance. A copy is printed when a customer orders it, and the printing cost is subtracted from your royalty on that sale. That is why KDP suits a first book: the downside is your time, not a garage full of inventory. It is also why Amazon is crowded with books nobody buys, which is the part most tutorials leave out.

Step 1: set up your KDP account

Setup takes under an hour if your details are ready. Use your legal name: KDP says the name in Account Details should be the legal name of the author, and pen names belong on the book, not on the account.

Step 2: choose the niche before you write a page

The most common way to fail on KDP is to treat it as an upload game. The pattern is easy to recognise: seventy titles published in a couple of months, each a thin eBook or a generic interior behind a new cover, and a royalty report that still reads zero. Nothing in KDP rewards the count. A book sells when a shopper searching Amazon finds it and prefers it to the alternatives. A book nobody is searching for has no route to a buyer, and seventy of them have seventy times no route.

Amazon has now closed that door from its side too. KDP's Create a Book page limits every account to two new titles per format each week, and its content quality guide lists content that is not meaningfully different from other books in the store, and content excessively reused within or across books, among the things that disappoint customers and can be removed.

The research method costs nothing. KDP's own keyword guidance says to search your candidate phrases on Amazon and review what the search field suggests, and its category guidance says to check where similar books are shelved. Do both before writing. If the suggestions never mention your idea, or the first page of results is already exactly what the searcher wanted, change the idea while it is still cheap to change. Deciding which idea deserves the work is the subject of our Digital Products program, which spends its first module on validation and pre-selling.

Step 3: prepare the manuscript and cover

KDP checks files mechanically, so most rejections are measurement errors rather than judgement calls.

• eBook. KDP recommends DOCX, EPUB or KPF, the format its Kindle Create tool produces. Reflowable text matters more than page design, because readers change the font size.
• Paperback interior. Minimum 24 pages. A file with bleed must be a PDF; without bleed, KDP also accepts DOCX and converts it. Images need 300 DPI, and the inside margin grows with page count, from 0.375 inches up to 150 pages.
• Paperback cover. One continuous PDF: back cover, spine and front, with 0.125 inches of bleed on every side. Spine text is only printed on books with more than 79 pages.
• Not every book suits Kindle. KDP's quality guide lists puzzle books, blank journals and coloring books as unsuited to the eBook format. Those are print products.

For a worked example of interior and cover maths on a specific trim size, see our tutorial on making a coloring book for Amazon KDP. If your book is exercises around a method you teach, how to make a workbook to sell covers the structure.

Step 4: title, categories and keywords

The details page is where a shopper's search meets your book, and KDP polices it. Its metadata guidelines are stricter than most beginners expect.

• Title. Only the title as it appears on the cover. No repeated generic keywords, no "bestselling", no "free", no references to other authors or trademarks. Title and subtitle together must stay under 200 characters.
• Categories. You select three. KDP may remove or change a category that does not fit the book.
• Keywords. Up to seven keywords or short phrases. Do not repeat the title or the categories, and do not use other authors' names, brands you do not own, or Amazon program names such as Kindle Unlimited.
• Description. No contact details, URLs, reviews, pricing or keyword lists.

Step 5: answer the AI question honestly

During setup KDP asks whether the book contains AI-generated content. The content guidelines draw one line. Text, images or translations created by an AI tool are AI-generated, even after substantial edits, and must be declared when you publish or republish; that includes the cover. Content you created yourself and then edited, refined, error-checked or brainstormed with AI tools is AI-assisted, and KDP says it is not necessary to tell it.

The declaration is information for KDP. The guidelines do not describe a label on the product page. They do say you are responsible for AI content meeting every other rule, including intellectual property. If AI is part of your production line, our guide to AI tools for digital products compares how KDP, Etsy and other marketplaces treat it.

Step 6: price it with the royalty math in front of you

KDP pays by band, and the bands have edges. Two prices matter more than any others on Amazon.com: $9.99 for paperbacks and $12.99 for eBooks.

eBooks. The 70% option applies to list prices from $2.99 to $12.99 and subtracts a delivery cost of $0.15 per megabyte. Outside that band you earn 35%. The 70% option also requires the eBook to be priced at least 20% below any print edition and applies only to sales in KDP's listed territories; other sales earn 35%.

Read the last two bars together. Raising an eBook from $12.99 to $14.99 cuts the royalty from $8.99 to $5.25, and the price has to pass about $25.70 at 35% before it earns more than it did at $12.99. A large file changes the picture as well: an image-heavy 10 MB eBook loses $1.50 a sale to delivery on the 70% option.

Paperbacks. The formula is royalty rate times list price, minus printing cost. On Amazon.com the rate is 60% at $9.99 and above and 50% at $9.98 and below. Printing for black ink on a regular trim size is a flat $2.30 up to 110 pages, then $1.00 plus $0.012 a page. Trims wider than 6.12 inches or taller than 9 inches cost more: $2.84 flat, then $1.00 plus $0.017 a page.

That table is a 200-page, 6 by 9 inch, black-ink book. The jump between the second and third rows is the whole lesson: one cent of list price adds a dollar of royalty. The last row is the same book sold through Expanded Distribution to other retailers, which pays 40%.

Step 7: publish, proof and wait for the first payment

Order a proof of any print book before you approve it. A screen preview cannot show you line weight, cream against white paper or a spine that has drifted. Then publish, and let the timelines run.

Direct deposit has no minimum payout. Wire and check payments wait until the balance reaches 100 in the marketplace currency on Amazon.com, the UK and the euro sites. The practical consequence for a new publisher is patience: the first money from a book published today arrives two to three months from now.

Amazon KDP guide 2026: what changed this year

Most KDP tutorials online were written before these rules. If advice you are following contradicts this table, check the date on it.

The two title limits come from KDP's Create a Book page, which sets creation and first-time submission at two titles per format each week, counted separately for eBook, paperback and hardcover and reset every Sunday at 12:00 AM UTC. The dates are from KDP's community announcement. Updating a title you have already submitted does not count against the limit.

Self-publishing on Amazon KDP: mistakes that cost beginners

• Publishing before validating. The file is the easy part. The question is whether anyone is looking for this book.
• Pricing a paperback at $9.95. Under $9.99 the rate is 50%. Four cents more pays the 60% rate.
• Enrolling in KDP Select by default. It locks the eBook to KDP for 90 days. Decide on purpose.
• Keyword-stuffed titles. They break the metadata guidelines, and KDP removes content that does.
• Declaring generated content as assisted. Editing does not move content from one category to the other.
• Reading royalties as revenue. A royalty per copy says nothing about how many copies sell. Plan around the copies.

If your idea is a journal, planner or log book, the rules differ: no ISBN, a separate checkbox and slower review, all covered in low-content books on KDP. For everything else, our list of the best digital products to sell on Amazon shows which formats Amazon supports and which it does not.

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Selling on Amazon KDP: FAQ