Does size matter?

[Jim]

Gingerlily - Elephant Philosopher wrote: "I inherited all my grandmother's jewellry when she died. Pity it was mostly nasty plastic beads... She was posh and all!"

Of course, you can almost define posh as the ability to wear cheap jewellry without looking trashy :-)

[Patti (baconater)]

I wish I could carry off wearing good jewelry.

[Jim]

I wouldn't mind being able to carry off some good jewellry

[Patti (baconater)]

You couldn't. Your moral compass is too finely tuned.

[Will]

Im not sure Patti: I could just see Jim as Raffles...

[Patti (baconater)]

I can see him in The Lottery.

I'm sure he'd use a fine gravel, though.

[Will]

Gravel? In his voice, presumably...

[Jim]

The film, the TV series or the the big hand saying 'It could be you'? :-)

[Patti (baconater)]

The classic short story, actually.

That what I get for making a literary allusion, eh? ;)

[Andy]

The post on the blog that Will originally linked to has been removed and the blogger has retracted his theories as being bunkum. As he realized Amazon only include the book image in the file size if it's part of the file you upload (i.e. the mobi, html etc). If you upload it separately via KDP it doesn't count towards the size. As far as I can tell, the new image guidelines are not for images within the book which would bump up the delivery costs.

[Patti (baconater)]

Oh that's good, Andy.

The whole thing really confused me.

[Andy]

If you're interested Patti, my first book is around 70k words and sells for £1.99 of which Amazon take 6p (9 cents on .com) for delivery costs based on a file size of 0.58mb (uploaded as a .zip file to make it smaller). That file includes a jpeg on the first page of the book which is included in the file size, omitting it would get the delivery cost down to 3p but I kinda like it so chose to leave it.

My other book is 110k words which I flog for £2.99, and again Zon charge 6p to send it down the interweb, the extra 40k words not amounting to many more kilobytes (it also has a purdy picture on the inside cover).

The actual costs are as follows:

Amazon.com: US $0.15/MB
India on Amazon.com: INR ₹7/MB
Amazon CA: CAD $0.15/MB
Brazil: BRL R$0.30/MB
Amazon.co.uk: UK £0.10/MB
Amazon.de: €0,12/MB
Amazon.fr: €0,12/MB
Amazon.es: €0,12/MB
Amazon.it: €0,12/MB
Amazon.co.jp: JPY1/MB for files less than 10MB, no charge for files equal to or over 10MB
Amazon.com.mx: MXN $1/MB
Amazon.com.au: AUD $0.15/MB

[Patti (baconater)]

I'm surprised they don't just include the delivery costs in their cut.

[Andy]

I guess it's a way of making authors submit more "efficient" file sizes. Anything we upload to KDP has to be stored on their servers, and then delivered to readers all of which costs money (although likely a fraction of what Zon charges). For instance if you upload your book as a Word document the file size is often three times the size of a HTML file (which is pretty much the file format that kindles use anyway).

[Patti (baconater)]

Oh, that makes sense.