Almost everyone we want to talk to has already sold a PDF. This is not an argument that you should stop. It is an argument about which of the two jobs each one is good at, and they are different jobs.
It is finished. You write it once, it is done, and it does not need a server. It is a real object you can put a price and a cover on, which makes it easy to sell and easy to gift. It works offline forever and nobody can switch it off. If your goal is a one-off launch to your list, a PDF is still the most efficient thing you can make, and you should make one.
It is also yours in a way a platform never is. That matters, and any page telling you otherwise is selling something.
A PDF is bought in a moment of enthusiasm and opened in a kitchen, and those are different moments. Nobody scales a PDF to six servings. Nobody searches one for "the thing with the leeks". It does not know what you have already cooked. On a phone, propped against a bag of flour, it is a document you pinch and drag.
And commercially it is a single transaction. Someone pays you nine dollars once, and then the relationship is over unless you write another one. The work of selling it starts again from zero every launch.
| Recipe ebook or PDF | A recipe app | |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to produce | High once, then none | None if it reads recipes you already published |
| Works offline forever | Yes | Partly, and never as reliably as a file |
| Yours if the platform disappears | Completely | Only if you can export, so check that you can |
| Scaling servings, search, saving | No | Yes |
| Usable one-handed in a kitchen | Barely | That is the whole design |
| Revenue shape | One payment | Monthly, if readers choose it |
| Updating it after a mistake | Reissue and re-email everyone | Fix it once |
| Reason to open it next Tuesday | Not really | That is the point |
Keep selling the PDF. Put it on a shelf inside the app as well, where the people most likely to buy it already are. A reader who cooks from you every week is a better prospect for your book than anyone who will ever see a launch email, and they are the ones in the app.
The ebook is how a new reader pays you the first time. The app is how the same reader keeps paying you and keeps cooking from you. Neither replaces the other, and running both costs you nothing extra in writing, because the app is built out of the recipes you have already published.
Selling files through the app is not built. Today the shelf would be links out to wherever your book already sells, which means the checkout, the customer and the money stay exactly where they are now. Delivering an ebook inside the app is on the list and is not there yet.
Paste your blog. It reads the recipes you have already written and shows them as an app, which is a more useful thing to compare against your PDF than anything we could write here.