The math behind the $1,155 figure
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The following is supplemental to this post.
500 copies @ 99¢
500 copies @ $3.99
Profit from the 99¢ sale period would be $175.
500 x $0.35 = $175
That's 35¢ per copy sold, which is what Amazon pays. The 70% royalty option doesn't become available until the book is priced at $2.99.
Sure, we could do a Kindle Countdown and keep the royalty at 70%, but I doubt our anthology would even be allowed into the program. The material wouldn't be exclusive to Amazon.
The profit from the $3.99 period isn't so straight forward. No, it's not simply 70% of the total. So, the following isn't right.
$3.99 x 0.70 = $2.79
When you have the 70% royalty option on Amazon, you have to factor in a delivery charge, the price of getting more money from Amazon. Usually this isn't a problem, but when you have large anthologies, it's something that has to be taken into account.
The delivery charge is 15¢ per MB.
A full length novel I formatted recently was 810 KB.
Since there are 1,024 KB in 1 MB, that book was 0.79 MB. Times that by 10 books in the scenario of the accompanying post, and you arrive at 7.9 MB.
7.9 MB x 15¢ = $1.19 (rounded)
That's what we lose off each $3.99 copy sold. The actual royalty would be...
($3.99 - $1.19) x 0.70 = $1.96
500 copies x $1.96 = $980
Add that to the $175 during the 99¢ sale...
$1,155 total
