📖 I Published My Book on Amazon KDP and Made 10x Less Than on My Own Store

Amazon KDP promises scale and reach that no indie author can build alone. I published a technical book there, tracked the numbers for a month, and the economics told a story Amazon does not put on the landing page. Here is what I learned about royalties, pricing traps, and why your own store might still be the better bet.

Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I share honest numbers and lessons from publishing, building, and selling technical products as an independent creator.

I had already published two ebooks through my own store when I decided to bring one of them to Amazon KDP. Mostly I wanted physical paperback and hardcover editions to exist, but since the infrastructure was there, I listed the ebook as well.

The publishing process was smooth enough. Formatting had a few traps, but nothing that a careful previewer check could not catch. What caught me off guard was the royalty structure and the pricing dead zone it creates between $10 and $20.

After a month of tracking sales, the results were in. My Amazon KDP revenue was more than 10 times lower than what the same book earned on my own store over the same period. The promised scale never materialized for a niche technical title.

The full article breaks down the exact royalty math, the advertising experiments that did not pay off, why Amazon's pricing tiers push every ebook under $10, and when KDP still makes sense despite all of this.