Flipping Kindle Books?

Very interesting question. I personally can't see anything wrong with doing exactly as you suggest - unpublish it then transfer to new owner and then new owner uploads it again. I did set up a website for people to buy and sell the original rights to e-books some time ago but it got no interest. Its at FlipAuthor.com

Interesting concept but may be hard to implement for the reasons you already stated.

Personally, insted of selling the rights I would do one or all of these:
1) Publish it in different formats - Example Nook Book or CreateSpace
2) Develop other books of similar subject matter and cross promote them using the popularity of your first book to generate sales for your new books.
3) Build a website with an opt-in page to build a list - then use affiliate sales to promote other products

The tough part is getting the first book to be popular enough to generate sales. You have that done so the rest of these should increase your income far beyond what you could get from a 1 time pay out flipping it.

To my knowledge there are no issues with doing this with Amazon's TOS (but I've not looked in about a year). Book projects are traded/sold all the time with big publishers - and they have a tendency to gobble up other smaller publishers as well.

The biggest issue is if you're selling the book - or the account (ie the publishing business). If you're just selling the book - then you would have to unpublish it and let the buyer publish it - which would instantly loose all reviews etc and the buyer would be starting from scratch. As a buyer I'd want to purchase the publishing business along with your amazon account. It gets complicated if you have multiple books in the account that you do not want to sell.

Also, make sure you have the paper work ready for due diligence - copyright information, work for hire contracts, model releases, tax figures and of course revenue/expenses/profits.

In general you can flip a book - you're basically selling either a business or a business asset - the devil is in the details.

--Jack

Interesting idea. I can see why you would want to sell it - same reason anyone sells a website. You get a higher upfront cash payment instead of waiting for the $300 a month. You might be able to sell the rights for $3000-$5000.

I don't like this idea. I don't think Amazon KDP will like it either. It's out of the norm for how book authors and publishers use the platform. One of the main issues is that once a book is published and bought ($1-$300 month worth), you can unpublish it, but this only means the author does not continue selling it.

That book will live on in Amazon's system because Amazon keeps it on file so that previous buyers can download it again if need be. Therefore, another person publishing this same exact title could be subject to the PLR penalty. Amazon could make the new "owner" prove their ownership with links/documentation, etc. If that ownership is insufficient, they won't be able to sell it.

Seems like you're looking to try this out, but I think it's going to be a pain in the butt to implement. You should contact KDP customer service and ask them if this book flipping is even possible under their TOS - that should be your starting point IMHO.

If you really desire to make more money from books, the best way to do that is to keep writing and publishing more books. KDP publishing is very hit or miss. However, if you work at building up your own author brand, stick to a theme of what you do best - you will eventually develop a fan base.

Sounds to me like you're giving up too soon on writing books for yourself. Don't get discouraged. Keep at it. You're into zombies, well, develop a great storyline, memorable characters, cool zombies and write a series based on that. Use your imagination. People love series. Zombie is a popular niche, and you can do something more with it if you commit to doing the actual grunt work of writing.