Hamburger Casserole Recipes FTW!

• No book cover - People like books they can see. Originally we just had a black box, then an image. But after looking at that for a while, it just didn't work. So I bought BoxShot3D, which creates ray-traced images of virtual books. Presto Chango, we have a book cover. Much better.
• Used a desktop publishing program - This hurt.

  To start this off, I copied all the html from the website into a text file, then imported into Scribus, the desktop publishing program on Ubunutu. Hours and hours later, I finally had set up all of my paragraph styles and had it tweaked just the way I wanted it. So then I exported it as a PDF and imported it into Amazon.

  Looked like crap.

  After thrashing around quite a bit, it turns out that Amazon will take PDFs, but they just do some kind of hokey OCR on them, making them look awful. The native format they like the best? Html

  Ouch. So then I had to go back and reformat the html. With over 100 recipes, this took many hours.

• Didn't preview the book before uploading - We're now on version 3.0 of the book. Each time I uploaded Amazon gave me the chance to preview the results. Trust me, use the preview. I finally got the book looking half-way right -- I think.I have a sneaking feeling that although it's html, kindle publishing is really a new format and will require new tricks.
• No social support - Once the book was uploaded and on the site, we immediately started getting visits, but no purchases. After thinking about it, we started wondering "Why would anybody buy, anyway? How do they know what they are getting?"

  People expect some kind of social support from others before purchasing things. To fix this, we sent out free copies of our ebook and had a few friends preview it. There's not much you can say about a book with recipes in it, but any little bit helps. We're hoping to have between five and ten people recommend the book. Not sure if that will work out of not.

• No marketing/pricing strategy - This is the big one.

  Although we had a site generating over 15K visits per month, with high numbers for time on site and repeat visits, there was really no evidence that people would want to buy anything. Without any evidence at all, even losing two days creating the ebook could turn out to be a huge waste of time.

  I recently read an article on reddit from a guy who spent many years and all his money on a startup and then failed at it. Damn! Years! I don't mind failing, but I want to fail fast. Spending 2 or 3 days on something that doesn't have a good chance of generating returns isn't a very good investment of my time. Failing is fine. I love failing. But fail fast and use up the minimal resources possible when you fail. I should have set up a dummy link, pitched the book, and then sat back and watched to see how many people clicked on it. That would have taken 10 minutes, and it would have saved me lots of work. Some people don't like doing that, but I'd much rather apologize to a few people for not having an ebook ready yet than spend a lot of time doing stuff simply because in my mind I think somebody is going to want it

All in all, making an ebook was very simple -- but it also can be a huge time sink. There are a dozen little details, each of which could take a lot of time. You should see the controls on the 3-D raytracer! All kinds of cool stuff, like setting the glossiness of the material or the angle of the camera and lighting. I literally spent over an hour playing around with just this tool, setting little bits here and there and then pushing the render button to see how it looked.

Programmers and analytical people like me are really good at this -- imagining some person somewhere who is going to care whether or not the depth of field is set the "right" way or not. I have to be constantly on-guard against this tendency.

Was it worth it? If I had to guess, I'd say no. I seriously doubt this ebook will ever make the money back that I put into publishing it. But because I got to learn about ebooks, it was a strategic investment. Hopefully this investment will pay off down the road. Sometimes you can take a 3-day hit -- but you always have to be honest with yourself about what you're doing.