Amazon Print Fee Increase

I received an e-mail from Amazon recently (spoiler alert - these never contain good news). In summary, Amazon states "On June 20, 2023, we're changing our fees to better align with today's cost to print books." Which means Amazon is reducing Author royalties to increase Amazon profits. They recommended checking my print book prices to confirm the new (lower) royalty rates and suggested adjusting prices accordingly. So, I did.

Although my paperbacks were all priced relatively low to begin with, I decided to lower the prices even further, instead of raising them, as Amazon subtly suggested. Historically, I've made most of my royalty profit from eBooks, not paperbacks, so lowering the prices is no great sacrifice on my part.

What I did find interesting is what Amazon paperbacks cost when the author chooses the absolute minimum allowable profit. For clarification, the lowest cost Amazon will let you price your book at is the price at which you will receive a one-US-cent royalty (aka, a penny) via their "Expanded Distribution" option. To be fair, the royalties on the official Amazon websites are more, as they vary by marketplace/seller, etc. You are only allowed to set one price, which is then automatically adjusted for country, marketplace, etc. For example, I do not have the option to set unique book prices in each different country or marketplace.

So, for transparency, below are the new costs of my paperbacks, at the lowest possible price to still be included in Amazon's "Expanded Distribution" option. These are the lowest prices I can sell Amazon-published paperbacks at, and my royalties vary from $0.01 USD to $3.07 USD (depending on the book and marketplace). Note, print costs vary based on the number of pages in the paperback, the actual book size, etc.

As you can see, authors don't make much profit selling paperbacks on Amazon. So if you're considering complaining about the high price of print books, you know who to blame.