How To Fondue

The fondue site was called GoFondue and for back then it was awesome. I hand coded the site in HTML/CSS because back then no one knew what a blog was. And I was always a big fan of fondue. Who doesn’t love hot cheese or chocolate and dunking things. Fondue is good stuff.

I had tons of traffic and make some decent money running ads and using Amazon’s affiliate program. Money that paid for more fondue pots and tons of ingredients for recipe testing. There were no sponsors back then, I paid for everything myself. I tried many different recipes. Some were great, some not so much. I experimented with different cheeses and different ingredients to dip. I was learning more and more about how to fondue everyday. And I put it all on the GoFondue website.

But fondue is much more than hot cheese. I moved on to hot oil and broth fondues where you cook meat and vegetables in the fondue pot. And the recipes that were the most fun to try were for the chocolate fondues. Fondue is the way to go when you want a decadent dessert. And in my house, that was every single night.

Years later, after one of those infamous Goggle updates, I lost all of my traffic. It was sad but I really didn’t dwell on it and just moved on. I was writing on some blogs and I even got a publishing deal to write a Panini Cookbook. The fondue domain came up for renewal and I passed on it. I figured letting the domain expire would be the end of fondue days even though I still had all of these great fondue recipes just sitting on my computer.

Writing The Everything Panini Press Cookbook (Everything Series) for Adams Media was a great experience but it was really hard. I had about 3 months to come up with 300 recipes and do all the writing that goes with a cookbook. Trying out new recipes, cooking and writing are all fun things to spend your time doing. But on a crazy timeline like that, it was very stressful. Mostly I was glad when I finished the book and didn’t really enjoy the process as much as I thought I would.

If I was going to write another cookbook, I thought that i could do it on my own timeline and why not try out self publishing. The publishing industry is really going through an upheaval similar to how the music industry was completely turned on its head by file sharing sites and then by Apple. Amazon Kindle publishing seemed like the way to go so I read all the self publishing books, blogs and listened to the all podcasts I could find until I had a handle on it. There’s always more to learn and to experiment with in the self publishing world but I wanted to get a book out there.

So I took my all of best fondue recipes and wrote a Kindle eBook called How To Fondue. There’s cheese fondue, hot oil fondue, broth fondue and of course there’s dessert fondue recipes in there too. Here’s the link to my book in case you’re interested. By the way fondue pots make for great holiday gifts and why not throw in a Kindle eBook full of great recipes to sweeten the pot.

I enjoyed the self publishing process so much that I plan on doing it again and again. I like how I get to make all the decisions and how it’s totally on me whether the book does well or not. I’ll be writing more about self publishing on this site in upcoming posts. And there should be some more book announcements coming soon too.