Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
No, that's not how it works. You upload the combined file to Amazon and they split it out. The Mobi-only part gets downloaded to older kindle devices, and the kf8 part to newer kindle devices. Goodness knows what they do with the source archive.
I don't know how they calculate the delivery fee if the KF8 and Mobi sections are very different in size. I suspect that it's unlikely that they will be significantly different.
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The "delivery fee" is determined by the size of the file
you upload when you are setting up your listing. It actually has nothing at all to do with "delivery," how many times a customer loads a book on a Kindle, or the file size a customer receives or downloads when they make a purchase.
If you upload your 30MB $6.99 eBook file, and are on a 70% royalty plan, you get dinged for a $4.50 delivery fee with every Amazon sale. Your 70% royalty for each sale is actually [6.99 - (30MB x $0.15)] x 70% = $1.74. Since your 70% royalty is actually only 25% you are then advised to just use the 35% royalty plan because there is no "delivery fee" at 35%. If I wanted to make the $4.89 royalty implied by the 70% plan I would need to price my book at $11.50 so as to accommodate the delivery fee.
That's why I say it's pretty underhanded. They use an ambiguous phrase like "delivery cost" to make us think it is probably situational or doesn't apply to us. Then they bury the details and $.015/MB price so we are less likely to find it. And since text-only eBooks are 2MB or under most of the people selling them don't notice the skimming and don't understand why someone with a large file has a problem with the "delivery fee."
If I publish a color comic book, or children's book, aimed at looking as good as it can look on the Kindle Fire, I either have to charge exorbitantly to counteract the high fees or accept the fact that I will never make more than a 35% royalty from Amazon.
To summarize: If you upload a 30MB MOBI when you create your book listing you will pay a $4.50 fee per sale or chop yourself down to 35% royalty.
Add huge images to an EPUB to get yourself up to 10MB or so. Then convert it to MOBI and upload it as a placeholder for another book. Look at the royalty summary page and you'll see what I mean.