Right direction, wrong path

What’s a word that means stepping out into a rickety bridge, one wrong step can send you down the wrong path? Like if you rush to the Amazon store without setting up your ISBN, LCCN first... then you have just created a book, which will never be sold in any indie bookstore anywhere.

The process of publishing a book is straightforward, but not easy. Maybe its like baking a cake; it’s not just the ingredients you add, but the way you do, the order in which they are added and the time it takes for each step. I dunno. The ingredients are not secret, they are all out there on the Internet.

It’s the bakers skill that matters.