Every page of a color book is printed in color, including the blank-feeling ones — KDP prices the ink choice across the whole file, not per illustrated page. That one fact explains most color-book pricing failures: an author prices a long illustrated book as if only the pictures cost money, and discovers the print cost has eaten the royalty. This page puts the three inks side by side using KDP’s published Amazon.com tables, the same tables our royalty calculator runs.
The rates (Amazon.com, paperback)
| Ink | Regular trim | Large trim* | Page range | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black ink | $2.30 flat to 110 pp, then $1.00 + $0.012/pg | $2.84 flat, then $1.00 + $0.017/pg | 24–828 | White, cream, or groundwood |
| Standard color | $1.00 + $0.0255/pg | $1.00 + $0.0402/pg | 72–600 | White only |
| Premium color | $3.60 flat at 24–40 pp, then $1.00 + $0.065/pg | $4.20 flat, then $1.00 + $0.080/pg | 24–828 | White only |
*Large trim = wider than 6.12″ or taller than 9″ — so 8.5×11″ and 8×10″ pay the large column even for identical content. Two eligibility facts matter as much as the rates: standard color exists only between 72 and 600 pages (short color books cannot use it), and both color inks print on white paper only — there is no cream color book on KDP.
What that means at real page counts (regular trim)
| Pages | Black ink | Standard color | Premium color | Premium minimum list price† |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $2.30 | $3.55 | $7.50 | $12.50 |
| 200 | $3.40 | $6.10 | $14.00 | $23.33 |
| 300 | $4.60 | $8.65 | $20.50 | $34.17 |
| 400 | $5.80 | $11.20 | $27.00 | $45.00 |
†Minimum list price = print cost ÷ 0.60, because royalty = rate × list price − print cost and KDP will not accept a negative royalty. Royalty rate on Amazon.com is 60% at $9.99 and above, 50% below (in force since June 10, 2025). At a $14.99 list price, a 200-page book earns $5.59 in black ink, $2.89 in standard color — and cannot exist in premium color at all, because $14.99 is below its $23.33 floor.
So which ink, decided
- Text with occasional color charts or photos, 72–600 pages: standard color. It exists precisely for illustrated books that do not need full saturation, at about 2× black ink instead of 5×.
- Color is the product — cookbooks, children’s picture books, photography, travel: premium color, and keep the book short. Premium economics work at 24–100 pages and collapse as page count grows; a 300-page premium book must list above $34 before it earns a cent.
- Color that is decorative rather than essential: black ink, honestly considered. A grayscale interior at $0.012 a page leaves room for a sane price; readers judge the content, not the ink line on your royalty report.
- Large-trim illustrated books: check the large column before committing — at 200 pages, large-trim premium is $17.00 against $14.00 regular.
Want your exact numbers before you commit? Run the free royalty calculator with your page count and trim — or send us your files and the free check will verify the specs behind the math, in plain English, free within 48 hours. Get the free check →
Check it yourself
- Find your cell: ink × trim class × page range in the rate table above — the flat short-book bands are the usual surprise.
- Compute print cost, then the floor: print cost ÷ 0.60 is the lowest list price KDP will accept at the 60% rate.
- Price from the floor up, not from what similar-looking books charge — a competitor’s $16.99 color book is either short, standard color, or losing money on every sale.
The honest limit
These are Amazon.com’s published US tables; every other marketplace has its own table in its own currency, and KDP revises the tables — standard color’s per-page rate itself dropped from $0.0270 to $0.0255 alongside the June 2025 royalty change. Treat this page as the decision framework and the current US numbers, and confirm your book’s exact print cost in KDP’s dashboard at pricing time: the dashboard is the final authority.
Or send us the files — the check is free
Email your interior and cover PDFs and we'll tell you exactly what's wrong — in plain English, free, within 48 hours. If it does need fixing, the by-hand fix is $19 and we redo it free if KDP rejects it for a formatting issue we were hired to fix. We rebuild files to be compliant with KDP's published spec — that's the promise we can keep.
Prefer the whole library in one file? The KDP Rejection Field Guide (free PDF) collects every guide, table, and the 13-point checklist.
More from the Help Library
- The KDP & IngramSpark Help Library — all guides & tools
- KDP royalty calculator — your price, pages, and ink, computed
- RGB vs CMYK — why print colors look washed out
- Hardcover vs paperback — specs and the real print-cost gap
- White vs cream paper — what changes and what does not
- Page count out of range — the minimum & maximum table
- The free rejection check — all 13 checks at once