You finished the manuscript. You paid for the edit. You commissioned a cover that actually looks like it belongs in your genre. And now you are staring at the single question that decides whether anyone will ever read the thing: where do you actually sell it?
That question is what ebook distribution answers. It is the least glamorous part of self-publishing and, dollar for dollar, the most consequential. Two authors can publish identical books on the same day, and the one who understands distribution will out-earn the other by a wide margin — not because the writing is better, but because the book is available in more places, priced correctly for each of them, and earning the higher royalties tier instead of the lower one.
This guide walks through the entire system: how ebook distribution actually works, who the players are, what royalties you can realistically expect from each channel, and how to choose a strategy that fits the book you have written rather than the book someone else wrote.
What Is Ebook Distribution, Really?
Ebook distribution is the process of getting your finished digital file listed, priced, and available for purchase or borrowing across the platforms where readers buy ebooks.
In traditional publishing, a publisher handles this through established trade relationships. In self-publishing, you handle it — either by uploading directly to each store, or by paying an intermediary to do it for you.
There are four distinct channel types, and most authors only think about the first one:
-
Retailers — the storefronts where readers buy: Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Barnes & Noble Nook.
-
Aggregators (distributors) — services that take one upload and push it to dozens of retailers on your behalf, in exchange for a commission or a subscription fee.
-
Libraries — OverDrive/Libby, hoopla, Bibliotheca and cloudLibrary, which license ebooks to public and school library systems. This channel is invisible to most new authors and quietly lucrative for the ones who use it.
-
Subscription services — Kindle Unlimited, Kobo Plus, and Everand, where readers pay a monthly fee and you are paid from a shared pool based on how much of your book is consumed.
A complete distribution strategy touches at least three of those four. If you are only on Amazon, you are working one channel out of four — and leaving the other three to your competitors.
The Three Distribution Models in Self-Publishing
Every distribution decision you will ever make reduces to one of three models.
1. Exclusive (Amazon only)
You enrol your ebook in KDP Select, Amazon’s exclusivity programme. Enrolment runs in rolling 90-day terms, and during that window your ebook cannot legally be sold anywhere else — not Kobo, not Apple Books, not your own website, not a PDF sent to your newsletter list.
In exchange you get inclusion in Kindle Unlimited (paid per page read), access to Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions, and the 70% royalty rate in a handful of territories where it otherwise would not apply.
Worth knowing: the exclusivity applies to the ebook only. Your paperback and hardcover can be distributed anywhere you like, through IngramSpark or anyone else, with no conflict.
2. Wide-Direct
You open an account with each retailer and upload to each one yourself: Kindle Direct Publishing, Kobo Writing Life, Apple Books, Google Play Books Partner Center, Barnes & Noble Press. You keep the full retailer royalty with no middleman taking a cut.
The cost is administrative. Five storefronts means five dashboards, five metadata forms, five sets of sales reports, and five places to update a file when you fix a typo. Manageable with one book. Genuinely painful with fifteen.
3. Wide-Aggregated
You upload once to a distributor and they handle every retailer relationship for you. They take either a percentage of your net royalties or a flat subscription fee. Reach expands dramatically, effort collapses, and your per-sale earnings shrink slightly.
The model most working authors actually use: hybrid
Direct to Amazon (the largest single market, so you keep every cent), direct to the one or two secondary retailers where you sell meaningfully, and an aggregator for the long tail of stores and library systems that individually generate small numbers but collectively add up.
Non-exclusive channels are what make the hybrid model possible. A platform like Ebokio Publishing, which takes a non-exclusive licence and lets you keep your rights, can be added to a wide strategy without disturbing anything already in place — no renegotiation, no waiting out a term.
Understanding Ebook Royalties: Where the Money Actually Goes
Royalties are where distribution stops being theoretical. Here is what the major channels pay as of 2026.
How Amazon calculates ebook royalties
Amazon offers two royalty options, and you choose one per title:
The 70% option applies when your list price sits between $2.99 and $9.99 (US) and the sale occurs in one of Amazon’s designated 70% territories. Amazon then subtracts a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte of your converted file before applying the percentage.
The formula: (list price − delivery cost) × 70%
A $4.99 ebook with a 1 MB file earns (4.99 − 0.15) × 0.70 = $3.39 per sale.
The 35% option applies at any permitted price — $0.99 up to $200 — with no delivery fee. That same $4.99 book would earn $1.75.
Two things trip authors up constantly:
The delivery fee punishes image-heavy books. A text novel compresses to 1–2 MB and loses pennies. A cookbook, children’s picture book, or illustrated guide can hit 10–15 MB, at which point the “70% tier” nets you closer to what the 35% tier would have paid. If your book is visual, compress your images aggressively before upload — it is the highest-return five minutes in the entire process.
Your real royalty rate is a blend, not a number. The 70% rate only applies to buyers physically located in eligible territories. A sale to a reader outside those countries pays 35% regardless of which option you selected. Authors with international readerships routinely earn less than the headline rate suggests and cannot work out why.
What the other retailers pay
|
Channel |
Typical ebook royalty |
Notes |
|---|---|---|
|
Amazon Kindle (KDP) |
70% ($2.99–$9.99), else 35% |
Minus $0.15/MB delivery fee on the 70% tier |
|
Apple Books |
~70% at all price points |
No delivery fee; no price-band restriction |
|
Kobo Writing Life |
~70% at $2.99+; ~45% below |
Strong in Canada, UK, Netherlands, Australia |
|
Google Play Books |
~70% |
Global reach, Android-native audience |
|
Barnes & Noble Press |
~70% in the $2.99–$9.99 band |
US-focused |
|
IngramSpark (ebook) |
~40% of list |
Value is reach, not rate |
|
Ebokio Publishing |
70% free / 80% Premium / 90% Pro |
Of net receipts; no price bands, no exclusivity |
|
Your own website |
90%+ after payment processing |
You supply 100% of the traffic |
Rates and price bands change. Confirm the current terms on each platform before you set a price — this is a snapshot, not a contract.
The aggregator’s cut
Distributors take their share from what the retailer pays you, not from the list price. Two pricing philosophies dominate:
-
Commission model — Draft2Digital takes roughly 10% of net royalties. On a book earning 70% at Apple, you net around 63%. Note that D2D moved away from being strictly fee-free in 2026, introducing a one-time activation fee for new accounts and a small annual maintenance fee for accounts below a modest earnings threshold.
-
Subscription model — PublishDrive charges a flat monthly or annual fee and lets you keep 100% of net royalties. This is worse than commission at low volume and better at high volume.
The break-even maths matter more than the marketing. Roughly speaking, once your non-Amazon ebook revenue clears somewhere around $100–$200 per month, a flat subscription beats a 10% commission. Below that, commission wins because you only pay when you earn. Run your own numbers rather than trusting either company’s comparison page.
The Major Ebook Retailers, Channel by Channel
Amazon Kindle dominates English-language ebooks and will almost certainly be your largest single channel. Go direct — there is no reason to pay an aggregator for the store you could reach yourself in twenty minutes.
Apple Books is consistently the strongest non-Amazon retailer for many indie authors, particularly in romance, women’s fiction, and literary work. Its editorial team curates promotions and genuinely does surface indie titles. Reachable directly or via aggregator.
Kobo punches far above its weight outside the United States — Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand especially. Kobo Writing Life is one of the friendlier author dashboards in the industry, and Kobo Plus offers subscription income without demanding exclusivity, which makes it structurally more attractive than Kindle Unlimited for wide authors.
Google Play Books reaches the enormous Android install base and performs well internationally, including across markets that other retailers underserve.
Barnes & Noble Press covers Nook and the US market. Free to use, quick to set up, worth having even if volume is modest.
Regional players — Tolino across Germany, Austria and Switzerland; Vivlio in France and Belgium; StreetLib for parts of Europe, Latin America and beyond. You will almost always reach these through an aggregator rather than directly, and for non-English or translated ebooks they can outperform the majors.
Author-first storefronts
There is a fourth category that sits between “major retailer” and “your own website”: curated digital bookshops that combine a storefront with the production tooling, and pay a far higher share than the big five.
Ebokio Publishing is built on this model. You upload an EPUB or DOCX, the platform formats and packages the book, a human reviewer checks it, and it goes live on the ebokio.com bookstore with a crawlable product page, author page and related-titles placement.
Three things make it structurally different from the majors:
-
Royalty share is 70% of net receipts on the free tier, rising to 80% and 90% on paid plans — and there are no $2.99–$9.99 price bands and no per-megabyte delivery fee, so illustrated and short-form titles are not penalised the way they are on Kindle. Full terms are on the pricing page.
-
There is no exclusivity requirement at any tier. The distribution licence is non-exclusive and you retain your rights, which means it slots into a wide strategy alongside Amazon, Apple and Kobo rather than competing with them for a slot.
-
Discovery works differently. An AI Librarian handles natural-language reader queries — someone types “a slow-burn romance set on a German island in winter” and gets routed to matching titles by metadata and content embeddings, rather than by the keyword-and-rank logic every author is already fighting over on Amazon.
The production side is bundled rather than bought separately: cover design, AI-assisted metadata, a built-in reader with text-to-speech and chapter summaries, and a live royalties dashboard. A full breakdown sits on the features page.
The honest trade-off, as with any curated store: audience size. No independent bookshop moves Amazon’s volume. Treat a channel like this as additive — a high-royalty layer on a wide strategy, and a place where a book can be discovered on its merits rather than its ad budget — not as a replacement for the majors.
Ebook Aggregators Compared
Draft2Digital is the default recommendation for a reason. Free formatting tools, Universal Book Links via Books2Read, straightforward royalty splits for co-authors, and reliable delivery to Apple, Kobo, B&N, Google Play, Tolino, Vivlio and the major library platforms. Note that D2D does not distribute to Amazon — you publish there yourself.
PublishDrive trades commission for subscription and offers the widest channel count in the category, including a very large number of library systems worldwide. Best suited to authors with substantial catalogues where a flat fee amortises across many titles.
IngramSpark is the print distribution giant with an ebook offering attached. Its ebook royalty rate is unremarkable, but the library and bookstore reach is unmatched. Most authors use IngramSpark for print and something else for ebooks.
StreetLib is worth a look for multilingual and non-English catalogues, with strong coverage in markets the US-centric services treat as afterthoughts.
Don’t Forget Libraries and Subscriptions
This is the channel most self-published authors skip, and it is a mistake.
Libraries buy ebooks at licence rates well above consumer prices, and library borrowers are among the most committed readers alive. OverDrive (the engine behind Libby), hoopla, Bibliotheca and cloudLibrary all accept indie titles through aggregators — Draft2Digital reaches the major ones at no additional cost beyond its standard commission. There is no downside and a meaningful upside.
Subscription services operate on a shared-pool model. Kindle Unlimited pays per page read from a monthly global fund, at a rate that has hovered in the range of roughly $0.004–$0.005 per page — meaning a 300-page novel read cover to cover generates somewhere around $1.20–$1.50. That is less than a single $4.99 sale, but subscription readers consume far more books than purchasers, and in series-driven genres the volume more than compensates.
The critical distinction: Kindle Unlimited demands exclusivity. Kobo Plus does not. If subscription income appeals but exclusivity does not, that asymmetry should shape your decision.
Selling Ebooks Direct From Your Own Site
Direct sales pay the highest royalties available anywhere — typically 90%+ after payment processing — and, more valuably, they give you the reader’s email address. Platforms like Payhip, Gumroad, Shopify and BookFunnel handle delivery and, importantly, EU VAT compliance on digital goods.
The catch is absolute: there is no discovery. Retailers bring you readers. Your own store brings you exactly as many readers as you bring it. Direct sales are a monetisation layer on top of an audience you have already built, not a substitute for building one.
And remember — while a title is enrolled in KDP Select, direct sales of that ebook are prohibited too.
This is the gap author-first storefronts try to close: a 90% royalty tier on Ebokio Publishing approaches direct-sale economics, but the title also sits in a browsable catalogue with deal pages and AI-driven recommendations, so some discovery happens without you supplying every visitor. Every product page is an indexable URL, so it works as a landing page for your newsletter and socials as well as a shelf readers stumble onto.
Getting Distribution-Ready: Files, Metadata and ISBNs
EPUB is the standard
EPUB 3 is the universal format. Every retailer accepts it. Amazon converts it internally; everyone else uses it directly. Amazon’s old MOBI format has been retired and should not appear anywhere in your workflow.
Validate your file before uploading. A reflowable EPUB that renders cleanly on a six-inch e-ink screen, a phone, and a tablet is the baseline — and formatting errors that slip through get quoted back at you in one-star reviews.
Metadata is your on-platform SEO
Your title, subtitle, author name, description, categories (BISAC codes) and keywords are how retail search engines decide whether to show your book to anyone. This is the single most under-invested area in all of self-publishing.
Practical rules:
-
Write the description for a reader deciding in eight seconds, not for a literary journal.
-
Choose categories by where your competitors actually sit, not by where you think your book belongs.
-
Use all available keyword fields, with phrases readers genuinely type.
-
Keep metadata identical across every channel. Inconsistency splits your identity and breaks retailer matching.
Do you need an ISBN?
For ebooks: usually not. Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Google Play and Barnes & Noble all assign their own internal identifiers free of charge. IngramSpark and most library and physical-trade channels do require one.
The trade-off is control. A free retailer-assigned ISBN lists that retailer as publisher of record. A self-purchased ISBN (Bowker in the US, Nielsen in the UK, your national agency elsewhere) lists you — cleaner if you are building a publishing imprint rather than releasing a single title. If you plan more than three books, buying a block is cheaper per unit than it looks.
Pricing and Territories
Price is a distribution decision, not just a revenue one, because it determines which royalty tier you land in.
-
$0.99 — loss-leader territory. Series starters and promotions only; you are in the 35% tier.
-
$2.99–$4.99 — the fiction sweet spot. Highest royalty tier, low reader resistance.
-
$5.99–$9.99 — non-fiction and established authors. Still 70%.
-
$9.99+ — drops you to 35%. Only justifiable for genuinely specialist reference work.
Set prices in local currency per market rather than accepting automatic conversion, which produces prices like €4.37 that read as careless. And check territory rights before you tick “worldwide” — if you have sold translation or regional rights, publishing globally puts you in breach of contract.
A Practical Ebook Distribution Workflow
-
Decide exclusive or wide before you upload anything. Reversing later means waiting out a 90-day term.
-
Finalise your EPUB and validate it across at least three device sizes.
-
Write your metadata once, in a document, and reuse it verbatim everywhere.
-
Publish direct to Amazon — largest market, no middleman.
-
Publish direct to your top secondary retailer — usually Apple Books or Kobo.
-
Route everything else through one aggregator, including library channels.
-
Set up pre-orders where supported. Pre-order sales accumulate and land on release day as a single spike, which is what moves ranking algorithms.
-
Track net royalties per channel for 90 days, then reallocate effort toward whatever is actually working.
Common Ebook Distribution Mistakes
-
Publishing only on Amazon by default, without ever consciously deciding to.
-
Enrolling in KDP Select while listed elsewhere. Amazon detects this and can terminate your account.
-
Ignoring the delivery fee on illustrated ebooks.
-
Different metadata on different stores, fragmenting your author identity.
-
Skipping libraries entirely.
-
Expecting instant results from going wide. Amazon’s algorithm rewards you in days; Kobo and Apple reward sustained presence over months. Authors who go wide, see nothing in three weeks, and retreat to exclusivity have not tested wide distribution — they have tested their own patience.
-
No universal book link. One link that routes readers to their preferred store beats five links they have to choose between.
Which Strategy Should You Choose?
Choose KDP Select if you write genre fiction in series — romance, thriller, fantasy, LitRPG, cosy mystery — where Kindle Unlimited readership is dense, you are launching your first book and want to reduce variables, or your audience is overwhelmingly US-based and Kindle-native.
Choose wide distribution if you write non-fiction, literary fiction, memoir, children’s or educational books, you have a significant international or non-US readership, you want library and bookstore reach, you are building a long-term catalogue and dislike single-platform dependency, or you sell direct to an existing audience.
The honest answer for most authors is: test both. KDP Select runs in 90-day terms and auto-renews unless you opt out. Run one or two terms exclusive, measure total net royalties, then go wide for two quarters and measure again. Real data from your own book beats anyone’s general advice — including this article’s.
If you land on wide, the cheapest way to start testing is a channel with no lock-in and no upfront cost. Publishing free on Ebokio puts a title in a curated bookstore at a 70% royalty share without touching your Amazon listing or committing you to anything — useful as a control while you measure everything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ebook distribution in self-publishing?
It is the process of making your ebook available across retailers, libraries and subscription platforms — either by uploading to each one directly or by using an aggregator that distributes on your behalf.
How much do authors earn in ebook royalties?
Most major retailers pay around 70% of list price within specified price bands. Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $9.99 minus a per-megabyte delivery fee, and 35% outside that range. Aggregators take roughly 10% of net, or charge a flat subscription instead.
Should I go exclusive with Amazon or distribute wide?
Exclusive suits series genre fiction with strong Kindle Unlimited readership. Wide suits non-fiction, international audiences, library reach, and long-term catalogue building. Terms run 90 days, so both are testable.
Do I need an ISBN for an ebook?
Not for the major retailers, which assign free internal identifiers. Yes for IngramSpark and most library and physical-trade channels. Buying your own gives you publisher-of-record status.
Which ebook format should I use?
EPUB 3. Every retailer accepts it, and Amazon converts it on upload. MOBI is retired.
Can I sell my ebook on my own website?
Yes, and it pays the highest royalty rate of any channel — unless the title is enrolled in KDP Select, which prohibits it.
Can I publish on a smaller store and on Amazon at the same time?
Yes, provided the smaller store’s licence is non-exclusive and you are not enrolled in KDP Select. Platforms like Ebokio take a non-exclusive licence and let you keep your rights, so the title can run in parallel with Amazon, Apple Books and Kobo — you set the price per channel.
How long does ebook distribution take?
Amazon typically publishes within 72 hours. Ebokio Publishing 12 hours. Other retailers range from 24 hours to two weeks. Aggregator delivery to the full network can take one to three weeks. Plan launches four to six weeks out.
Final Thoughts
Ebook distribution is not a one-time task you complete at launch. It is an ongoing strategic position that should shift as your catalogue grows, your readership spreads, and the platforms rewrite their own terms — which they do, regularly.
Start with the model that fits your genre. Track net royalties per channel rather than headline percentages. Keep your metadata disciplined and identical. And revisit the whole decision every ninety days, because the author who checks their numbers quarterly will always beat the one who picked a strategy in 2023 and never looked again.
If you are ready to put a book into distribution, Ebokio Publishing is free to start, takes EPUB or DOCX, and never asks for exclusivity — so you can add it to whatever strategy you have already chosen. Browse the bookstore to see how titles are presented to readers, or read how it works before you upload.
Royalty rates, fees and platform terms cited here reflect publicly available information as of 2026 and change frequently. Always confirm current terms directly with each platform before making pricing or distribution decisions.
