How to Sell Children's Books on Amazon, Etsy and Gumroad, and What Each Copy Pays

Children's book print and price planner

Pick the kind of book, the reader's age, the size, the page count and the ink, then the Amazon store you will sell in and your prices. The planner works out what KDP charges to print a copy, what each paperback sale pays you, the lowest price KDP will accept, whether libraries and bookshops can order it, the file sizes to make, what a Kindle edition and a PDF on Etsy or Gumroad would pay, and a page plan for the age you chose. It runs in your browser and uses KDP's published printing costs and royalty rates as of 23 September 2026.

What a 32-page picture book pays on Amazon

Here is the calculation most picture book authors need, done once with Amazon's published figures. The book: 32 pages, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, premium colour ink on white paper, sold on Amazon.com. KDP prints each copy when someone orders it and takes the printing cost out of your royalty, so there is nothing to pay up front, and the whole calculation is three numbers: the printing cost, the royalty rate, and your price.

The printing cost is $4.20. KDP charges a flat fee for premium colour paperbacks of 24 to 40 pages: $3.60 at regular trims and $4.20 at large trims. A trim is large when it is wider than 6.12 inches or taller than 9, which makes 8.5 x 8.5, 8 x 10 and 8.5 x 11 all large. Some guides quote $3.60 for a picture book; that is the regular-trim figure, which only applies to sizes like 6 x 9, and it would make each copy look $0.60 more profitable at $12.99 than it is.

The royalty rate is 60% or 50%. On Amazon.com a paperback listed at $9.99 or more earns 60% of the list price, and one listed at $9.98 or less earns 50%. The printing cost is then taken off.

Sources: KDP's Paperback Printing Cost (the formula, the colour table and the large-trim rule), Paperback Royalty (the 50% and 60% bands by store) and Expanded Distribution (40% minus printing), all read on 23 September 2026. KDP's royalty page says trim size does not affect printing cost while its printing cost table charges more for large trims; the table is what the Rights & Pricing screen uses, and it is what these figures follow. Check that screen for your own book before you set a price.

Four things the table shows

$9.99 is the price that matters most. Below it the book earns 50%, so at $9.98 you keep $0.79 a copy; at $9.99 you keep $1.79. That one cent more than doubles the royalty. KDP will not let you list the book below $8.40, because at that price 50% only just covers the printing, and a colour picture book priced in the low eights pays almost nothing.

24, 32 and 40 pages cost the same. The flat $4.20 covers every premium colour paperback from 24 to 40 pages at a large trim. The 32-page convention comes from offset printing, where sheets fold into 16-page sections; print on demand has no such constraint. Go past 40 and the price switches to $1.00 plus 8 cents a page: $4.36 at 42 pages, $4.84 at 48 and $6.12 at 64. A story that fits in 40 pages is cheaper to print than one that needs 42.

Standard colour does not help a picture book. KDP's cheaper standard colour ink starts at 72 pages, so anything shorter printed in colour is premium colour. Standard colour suits a long illustrated early reader or a colour activity book of 72 pages or more. And once a book is published, its ink and paper are locked, so a colour and a black-ink version would be two separate books.

Libraries and bookshops pay less. Expanded Distribution makes the paperback orderable by bookshops and libraries through distributors in the US and UK and pays 40% of list price minus printing: $1.00 a copy at $12.99, and nothing below $10.50. The square 8.5 x 8.5 size is eligible only with colour ink, which a picture book has anyway.

The same book in other Amazon stores

Each Amazon store has its own printing costs and its own 60% threshold. On Amazon.co.uk the book costs £3.24 to print, earns 60% from £7.99, and pays £2.15 at £8.99 and £2.75 at £9.99; the lowest price KDP allows is £6.48. On the German, French, Spanish and Italian stores it costs €3.61 to print and pays €4.18 at €12.99. In Canada and Australia the 60% rate only starts at 13.99 in local currency, so a picture book priced like a US one earns 50% there. The planner above switches between stores.

A picture book against a novel

A 200-page novel at 6 x 9 in black ink costs $3.40 to print and pays $5.59 at $14.99. The picture book pays $3.59 at $12.99 and $4.79 at $14.99, and most picture books sell for less than most novels. So a picture book earns less per copy online; its advantage is elsewhere, in the printed copy handed over at a school fair or a library reading, and in the grandparents who buy three.

How much money can you make from a children's book?

Price, minus what the printer and the store keep, times the copies you sell. Two of those are known before you write a word, and the third is the one nobody can give you. Anyone quoting a typical monthly income for children's books is guessing, and the guess usually comes from a handful of authors who made a lot, not the many who sold a few copies to family.

We cannot fill that gap either. Inkfluence AI sees that a book was sent to Etsy or Gumroad from the app, and the prices on public Gumroad pages, but no store tells us what sold. So here are worked examples, each labelled as an example, using the per-copy figures above.

Can you make money writing children's books?

Some people do, and the ones who do tend to share three habits. They write for one narrow age and one situation a parent recognises (the first night in a new bedroom, a new baby in the house), which gives the book a reason to be searched for and bought. They publish more than one book with the same character or format, so each new book sells the others. And they sell in person as well as online, because a children's book is often bought by an adult who wants to see and hold it first. None of that guarantees sales, and a first book that sells to family and friends is a normal first book.

What goes on the other side of the ledger

• Proof and author copies. A proof costs the printing price plus shipping and carries a "Not for Resale" mark, so it is for checking, not selling. Author copies cost the same and can be sold or given away.
• Illustration. Commissioning an illustrator for a 32-page picture book is the largest cost for most authors. On Inkfluence AI the pictures come from your plan's monthly allowance: Creator ($9.99 a month) includes 20, Premium ($19.99) 50, and each extra picture uses one chapter credit.
• An ISBN, if you want your own. KDP's free ISBN costs nothing but works only for the KDP edition and shows "Independently published" as the imprint. Your own ISBN, bought from your country's agency, lets you print the same edition elsewhere.
• Ads and events. Amazon ads and fair pitches are optional and paid for up front. Etsy's Offsite Ads charge only when an ad makes a sale.
• Tax. Amazon, Etsy and Gumroad deal with sales tax on their own sales in most places. What you sell by hand, and the income from all of it, is yours to report.

Where to sell a children's book

Children's books have a quirk that shapes everything else: the reader is not the buyer. A four-year-old does not search Amazon; a parent, grandparent or teacher does, often for a specific moment, and many of them want to hold the book before paying. That is why print and in-person sales matter more here than for almost any other kind of book.

Amazon paperback: where most picture books are bought

Publishing a paperback on KDP costs nothing up front, and Amazon's search is where families look for a book about a new sibling or a first day at school. Two settings decide whether they find yours. The first is the reading age. KDP's Primary Audience section has an optional Reading Age field, and KDP says a children's book without one may not be eligible for its children's categories and will not appear in age-specific search results. Its bands are 0 to 2 (simple picture books with few or no words), 3 to 5 (picture books), 6 to 8 (early readers and first chapter books), 9 to 12 (middle grade) and 13 to 17. After reviews come in, Amazon may replace your age with the one customers suggest. The second is the categories: choose the narrowest children's categories that honestly fit.

Order a proof copy before you publish. It costs the printing price plus shipping, arrives with "Not for Resale" printed on it, and shows you what a screen cannot: colours that print darker than they looked, text that sits too close to the gutter, a page turn that spoils a surprise. Read it aloud to a child in the right age band. For the full paperback set-up, the KDP paperback guide walks through each screen.

Kindle: good for chapter books, harder for picture books

A chapter book or early reader works on Kindle the way any text ebook does: upload the EPUB, the text reflows to the screen, and at 1 to 2 MB the delivery charge is a few cents. Price it between $2.99 and $12.99 on Amazon.com for the 70% royalty, a band Amazon widened from $9.99 on 7 July 2026 (see KDP royalties in 2026 for what each price pays).

A picture book is different, for two reasons. Its pages are designed as pages, so the best Kindle version is fixed-layout, with each page shown whole. Amazon retired its Kindle Kids' Book Creator in 2025 and now points authors to Kindle Create, which turns a PDF or a set of page images into an illustrated kids' ebook, with optional Guided View panels that lead a young reader around each page; the words need to be part of the page images already, which they are in a PDF exported from Inkfluence AI. Inkfluence AI's own EPUB is reflowable, with each picture and its words stacked, which reads well on a phone but is not the same as the printed page. The second reason is money: illustrated files are big, and the 70% royalty is worked out after a delivery charge of $0.15 per megabyte on Amazon.com (£0.10 on Amazon.co.uk). On Amazon.com, 70% pays more than 35% only when the price in dollars is higher than 0.3 times the file size in megabytes. A 20 MB picture book at $4.99 pays $1.39 at 70% and $1.75 at 35%; at $6.99 the 70% option wins, $2.79 against $2.45. KDP's pricing section shows what each option pays once the file is uploaded, and the planner above does the sum for any size.

KDP Select, which puts the ebook in Kindle Unlimited, runs in 90-day terms and requires the ebook to be exclusive to Amazon in digital form. While enrolled, you cannot sell the same book as a PDF on Etsy, Gumroad or your own site. The paperback is not affected.

Etsy: printables, classroom sets and gifts

Etsy shoppers search for things to print and things to give. For children's books that means printable coloring and activity pages, a story PDF families print at home, classroom packs for teachers, and books personalised with a child's name. A download listing can hold up to five files of up to 20MB each. Etsy charges $0.20 to list, renewed at $0.20 each time a copy sells, a 6.5% transaction fee and, for US shops, 3% + $0.25 payment processing, so a $4.99 printable keeps about $4.07 and a $6.99 one about $5.88.

Two Etsy rules apply to AI-made children's books, covered in the section on AI below: say in the description that AI was used, and name a production partner if someone else prints the copies you post. On Creator or Premium, Publish then Sell on Etsy in Inkfluence AI sends the book's EPUB and cover to your shop as a draft listing and adds an AI line to the description; add the PDF on Etsy (most buyers of a printable want the PDF), tick With an AI generator under How it's made, and activate it. The Etsy selling guide covers shop set-up.

Gumroad: for authors who already reach parents or teachers

Gumroad is a checkout, not a shop window: it turns a link into a payment and a download, and handles the sales tax as merchant of record. It suits a teacher selling a read-aloud story with discussion questions to other teachers, a parenting account selling a bedtime book to followers, or an author whose readers want the next book in a series before the paperback. Sales through your own link pay 10% + $0.50 plus card processing of 2.9% + $0.30, so a $4.99 PDF keeps about $3.55 and a $6.99 one $5.29; sales found through Gumroad's Discover marketplace pay a flat 30%. On Creator or Premium, Publish then Sell on Gumroad sends the EPUB and cover and switches the product on; attach the PDF on Gumroad. The Gumroad selling guide goes through each screen.

In person: fairs, readings and the shop down the road

KDP sells author copies of a published paperback at the printing cost, plus shipping and tax, and you are free to sell or give them away. For a picture book that makes every copy sold by hand worth far more than a royalty: $4.20 out, whatever you charge in. School fairs, library story times, farmers' markets and Christmas markets all work for picture books because the buyer can see and hold the book and the child can meet the person who made it. Bring a card reader, a sign with the price and the age the book suits, and something free for children to take away, such as a bookmark or a colouring page of the main character.

Independent bookshops and gift shops often take local authors' books on consignment: they stock a few copies, pay you an agreed share when they sell, and return the rest. Ask what share they keep before you agree, and bring a copy and a one-page sheet with the price, the reading age and the ISBN. Libraries order through distributors, which is what Expanded Distribution is for, but a local branch may also welcome a reading or a donated copy.

Which kind of children's book, which size, what it pays

The same maths for each kind of children's book at its usual size, on Amazon.com, with KDP's printing costs as of 23 September 2026. The chosen sizes and page counts are typical examples, not rules.

Picture books and ABC books are the expensive ones to print and the ones people most want in print. Price them at $9.99 or more. Early readers are where the ink decision matters most: colour pictures on 48 pages cost $4.12 a copy at 6 x 9, black ink $2.30, and the difference goes straight into the royalty. Many early readers use a colour cover with black-ink line drawings inside for exactly this reason. Chapter books and middle grade print in black ink on smaller trims and pay the most per copy, and they are the children's books that work best as Kindle ebooks. Coloring and activity books print cheaply in black ink, sell well as Amazon paperbacks and Etsy printables, and are the one kind Expanded Distribution's distributors will not take.

The coloring book guide for KDP goes deeper on that format, how to sell coloring books works through blank backs, paper and the Etsy printable, and the guide to writing a children's book covers word counts, structure and voice for each age.

Print specs for a children's book on KDP

The rules that catch children's book authors out, from KDP's help pages as they stood on 23 September 2026.

• 24 pages minimum for every paperback, counting every page including the title and copyright pages.
• Bleed is for pictures that run to the edge of the page. With bleed, the page is 0.125 inches wider and 0.25 inches taller than the trim (8.625 x 8.75 inches for an 8.5 x 8.5 book), the picture extends past the trim line, and the whole file must be set up with bleed even if only one page needs it. Without bleed, keep everything inside the margins. Covers always have 0.125 inches of bleed on every outer edge.
• Margins: at least 0.25 inches outside (0.375 with bleed), and an inside margin of 0.375 inches for 24 to 150 pages, growing with the page count.
• Spine: premium colour paper is 0.002347 inches a page, so a 32-page picture book has a spine of 0.075 inches and its full cover, with bleed, is 17.325 x 8.75 inches. KDP prints spine text only on books of more than 79 pages, and rejects a cover with spine text below that.
• Ink and paper are locked once the book is published. Picture books need premium colour; standard colour starts at 72 pages and is paperback only.
• Hardcover: 75 to 550 pages, in 5.5 x 8.5, 6 x 9, 6.14 x 9.21, 7 x 10 or 8.25 x 11 inches, black or premium colour. No square size, so no KDP hardcover picture book in the usual shape.
• ISBN and barcode: KDP offers a free ISBN for paperbacks and hardcovers, and adds a barcode to the back cover if your file has none, bottom right. Ebooks need no ISBN.

What the Inkfluence AI export gives you, and what to add

Picture books, coloring books and ABC books export at 8.5 x 8.5 inches, and coloring books can also export at 8.5 x 11. Export, then KDP, downloads a zip with the interior manuscript, the full wrap cover (back, spine and front, with 0.125 inches of bleed) and a front cover image for the Kindle edition, plus a READ ME that states the trim, the page count and the spine width. Kids' stories export at the usual chapter book sizes (5 x 8, 5.5 x 8.5, 6 x 9, 7 x 10, 8 x 10 or 8.5 x 11). The KDP package, EPUB and DOCX come with a paid plan or a credit pack; the PDF exports on every plan.

Four things to know before you upload a picture book. Choose No bleed for the manuscript. In the KDP interior, each picture sits inside the page margins rather than running off the edge, which is what KDP's No bleed setting expects. (The ordinary PDF export runs the pictures edge to edge at the trim size, which suits printing at home or a photo-book printer, not KDP.) Set the paper in the cover designer. Open the cover designer's Print tab and choose Premium color before exporting, so the spine is sized for colour paper; the designer starts on black and white. Bring the book to 24 pages. The Picture book format writes 10 to 16 story pages, and the book comes to fewer than 24 pages in the package even with the title and copyright pages (our test export of a 16-page story came to 19). Add pages in the editor under Contents, then Add: new story pages, painted in the book's style with Illustrate, or a dedication, questions for grown-ups, a draw-your-own page and an about the author page. ABC books (26 letter pages) and coloring books (every design is followed by a blank page) clear 24 on their own. Hardcover, a fixed-layout Kindle file and your own ISBN are not something the app makes: use Kindle Create with the PDF for a fixed-layout ebook, and type your own ISBN into the cover designer if you have one.

How to market a children's book

Marketing a children's book means reaching the adult who buys it, at the moment they are looking. A few things do most of the work, and none of them needs a budget.

• Name the moment, not just the topic. "A picture book for a child starting nursery" is found by the parent of a child starting nursery. Put the moment in the subtitle and the description, and pick the categories that match it.
• Show real pages. Parents judge a picture book in seconds by its pictures and how much text sits on a page. Use Amazon's A+ Content on your book page, and listing photos on Etsy, to show two or three spreads as they print.
• Give families something to share. A free colouring page of the main character, three questions to ask after reading, or a short read-aloud video with the book in your hands travels further than an advert.
• Go where children and books already meet. Libraries run story times, schools hold book weeks and fairs, and nurseries welcome a visitor who reads aloud. Ask first, bring copies, and leave a flyer with the price and where to buy.
• Write the next one. A second book with the same character sells the first, and parents who liked one look for more. The series is the strongest marketing a children's author has.
• Ask for honest reviews. Ask readers to review the book; never ask for a particular rating or offer anything in return. Reviews also bring in customer reading ages, which Amazon shows alongside yours.