How to price your book without guessing.

Most first-time authors price their book by looking at three other books and picking a number in the middle. That is not a method. It ignores what the book costs to print, what the retailer keeps, and what a reader thinks a number means before they have read a page.

Here is how we work it out. The figures below are close to what the platforms charge as of 2026, but every one of them moves. Check the retailer’s current calculator before you commit.

Start with what a printed copy costs you.

Print-on-demand pricing is a fixed charge per book plus a per-page charge. For a 280-page 6×9 paperback with a black-and-white interior, the print cost at Amazon KDP in the US store comes out a little over $4 as of 2026, and higher in some other marketplaces. IngramSpark is usually a little higher. We will use a rounded $5.00 for Amazon and $5.25 for Ingram below so the arithmetic is easy to follow; your book will differ. A color interior can double these figures, so run your own book through both calculators.

Print cost is the floor. Everything else is built on top of it.

The same book, two channels, one list price

Say you list the paperback at $14.99. What you keep depends on where the sale happens.

Amazon, sold on Amazon. KDP pays 60% of list, minus print cost, for paperbacks above a low-price threshold; below it the rate drops (50% under about $9.99 in the US as of 2026, so check the current page). Our $14.99 example is in the 60% tier. $14.99 x 0.60 = $8.99. Subtract $5.00 and you keep $3.99.

KDP Expanded Distribution. Sales to other retailers through KDP pay 40% of list, minus print cost. $6.00 minus $5.00 leaves $1.00.

IngramSpark at a 55% wholesale discount. Bookstores and wholesalers expect a discount in this range. You receive 45% of list, minus print cost. $6.75 minus $5.25 leaves $1.50.

IngramSpark at a 40% discount. You keep $3.74, but many stores will not order at 40%, so the higher margin is often on sales that never happen.

Two things follow. First, $14.99 is close to the minimum sensible list price for a book this size if you want bookstore distribution at all; at $12.99 the Ingram row at 55% drops to about 60 cents. Second, most authors should list on Amazon through KDP and everywhere else through Ingram, rather than relying on either company to reach the other’s shelves. If you do that with one ISBN, leave KDP Expanded Distribution switched off. Both services feed the same wholesale catalog, and a book listed twice causes availability and pricing problems that are slow to untangle.

Returns are the part nobody mentions.

Ingram lets you mark a book returnable, and bookstores mostly will not stock one that is not. But a return reverses the sale: the wholesale payment is clawed back, you are still charged for the printed copy, and you may pay to have it shipped to you or destroyed. One return can wipe out the margin on three or four sales. Set the book returnable only when you have a real reason to expect bookstore orders.

eBook pricing is a different machine.

There is no print cost, so the question becomes which royalty tier you land in.

Amazon’s durable principle: within a middle price band (historically $2.99 to $9.99 in the US store) you can choose a 70% royalty; outside it you get 35%. Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play run their own schedules, mostly a flat rate near 70% across a wider range. Check each store’s current terms; the bands shift and the exceptions are numerous.

The 70% option is paid on the list price minus a delivery fee charged per megabyte (about $0.15 per MB in the US store as of 2026). For a text-only novel of about 1 MB it is pennies. For a photography book or a picture book at 30 MB it can eat most of the royalty, and the 35% option, which carries no delivery fee, can pay you more. Compress your images and run both options through the calculator.

Read that last row again. Pricing above the band can pay you less per copy than pricing at the top of it. And $0.99 pays roughly a tenth of what $4.99 pays.

$0.99 is a promotion price, not a list price.

At $0.99 the book earns almost nothing, and many $0.99 buyers never open the book. It works for one purpose: getting a large number of people to sample the first book in a series so they pay full price for the rest. If you have one book and no series, a $0.99 list price is a permanent discount on your only asset. Use it for a dated promotion with a plan to raise it back, or not at all.

$2.99 versus $4.99

This is the decision most authors agonize over, so here is the honest version.

$2.99 is the bottom of the 70% band. It signals “indie” to experienced eBook buyers, which is not an insult; a large share of genre readers buy at this price on purpose. A lower price means more early sales, which means more early reviews. Early reviews are widely believed to affect how Amazon surfaces a new book, and whether or not the algorithm works that way, reviews help the next buyer decide. If this is your debut and you have no audience, that is a real advantage.

$4.99 signals a book that expects to be taken seriously. Per copy it earns about 70% more than $2.99, so six sales at $4.99 beat ten at $2.99. In our experience, readers who pay more are somewhat more likely to finish and review, which partly offsets the lower volume.

There is no universally right answer. There is a right answer for your genre and your situation.

Genre norms matter more than your opinion.

Readers have a price they expect, and a book outside that range reads as cheap or overpriced before they look at the description. Roughly, as of 2026: romance and thriller eBooks cluster from $2.99 to $5.99; literary fiction from $4.99 to $11.99; business and self-help non-fiction from $7.99 to $14.99; paperbacks in most categories from $12.99 to $18.99 for a book the size of our example. Do not trust those numbers. Open the top 100 in your specific category and write down what the books at positions 20 to 60 charge. Those are your peers, not the bestsellers with a marketing budget.

Keep the price the same everywhere.

Amazon watches the other stores. If your eBook is $4.99 on Amazon and $3.99 at Kobo, Amazon may match the lower price and pay royalties on the lower figure. Print works differently on KDP: Amazon may discount the shelf price to match another store, but your paperback royalty is calculated on the list price you set, so the risk of a price match is mainly on the eBook side. Keep print prices identical anyway, so that readers and bookstores see one number. Choose a price, set it identically on every store, and change it everywhere at once when you run a promotion. The one deliberate exception is making a series opener free elsewhere in the hope that Amazon matches it to $0.00. Amazon does not promise to, and it can take weeks; that is a tactic, not an accident.

A simple decision procedure

1. Get the print cost for your exact book from both KDP and IngramSpark.
2. Set the paperback list price so that Ingram at a 55% discount still leaves you at least $1.00 a copy. Round up to a price ending in .99.
3. Leave the book non-returnable until you have a reason to change that.
4. Price the eBook inside the 70% band, then check the delivery fee if your file is over 3 MB.
5. Check the top 100 in your category. If your number is outside the range you see, move it inside.
6. Debut with no audience, or first in a series: lean toward $2.99. Established readership, standalone, or non-fiction: lean toward $4.99 or higher.
7. Set the same price on every store. Reserve $0.99 for dated promotions.
8. Revisit after 90 days with sales data, not feelings.

Where Guardian Angel Press fits

Pricing is something we set up with you during production and distribution, because it depends on trim size, page count, and file size decisions made earlier. Every package includes distribution setup with prices worked through the calculators, not guessed. If you already have a book and the numbers are not working, get in touch and we will look at them with you.