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Break-Even Calculator

Self-publishing can genuinely cost nothing, or several thousand. Either way the useful number is the same: how many copies you have to sell before the book has paid for itself.

What you spent

Leave anything at zero if you did it yourself. Plenty of profitable books have zeros all the way down.

Editing or proofreading
$
Cover design
$
Formatting and layout
$
ISBN
$
Launch advertising
$
Everything else
$

To break even

0 copies

Total spent$0.00
You earn per copy$6.69
Copies to break even0

You spent nothing, so every copy is profit from the first sale.

Every line can honestly be zero. Plenty of profitable books were written, covered and formatted by their author, and KDP charges nothing to publish. The costs that most often surprise people are advertising, which is optional and easy to overspend, and paid editing, which is the one line most worth the money.

Break-even ignores time, deliberately. If you want to price your own hours in, add them as a cost line and watch the number move.

Rates are Amazon.com (US) figures, checked against KDP's own published examples on 25 August 2026. Amazon changes these without notice and they differ by marketplace, so confirm in your KDP dashboard before you commit to a price.

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