Kindle Unlimited or wide? Calculator
Compare KDP Select page reads with selling on every store, using your own numbers.
Your month, both ways
- Kindle Unlimited (exclusive)
- $418.00
- Wide (every store)
- $415.33
- Wide breaks even at
- 26%
| Royalty per Amazon sale | $3.28 |
|---|---|
| Amazon sales (same either way) | $328.00 |
| Kindle Unlimited page reads (exclusive only) | $90.00 |
| Apple, Kobo, Google Play and B&N at 70% (wide only) | $87.33 |
Rates checked against each platform's own help pages on 20 October 2026. US store prices in US dollars, before any tax.
What you are choosing between
Enrolling an ebook in KDP Select puts it in Kindle Unlimited, where Amazon pays from a monthly fund for every page subscribers read. In exchange the ebook has to be exclusive to Amazon: you can't sell it on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play or anywhere else. Going wide means leaving KDP Select and selling everywhere.
The per-page rate is not fixed. Amazon divides the KDP Select Global Fund (about $66 million in August 2026) by all pages read, and the US rate has recently moved between about $0.0042 and $0.0050 a page.
The calculator assumes your Amazon sales stay the same either way. In practice some Kindle Unlimited readers buy instead when the book leaves the service, and borrows are widely reported to count towards a book's sales rank, so treat the result as a starting point.
Questions
Is Kindle Unlimited worth it for authors?
It is worth it when your monthly page-read income is bigger than what you would earn from Apple, Kobo, Google Play and other stores combined. The break-even depends on your price and how many pages are read.