Will the KDP printing price affect your book sales? Could it be the end of printed books?

Amazon is going from $.012 to $.017 per page. That means it used to be $6.00 for a 500 page book, actually $7.00 given the $1.00 fixed cost. After the price increase it will be $8.50 for a 500 page book, or $9.50 with the unchanged $1.00 fixed cost.

But to get royalties from that book in line with the royalties from the ebook, the actual price for the printed books is already really high. An ebook that is priced at $4.99 is probably going to be about $21.99 for a paper copy and that is so huge an increase that increasing it by another $2 is not likely to make a really big difference. Most sales will continue to be of ebooks, obviously. But that was already true.

It’s possible that more authors will begin distributing printed books through Draft to Digital. But if the cost of paper goes up, then all venues that print books are going to be raising their prices, so I don’t know how much difference that will make.