Lament for the loss of data

Six years into self-publishing, what surprises me most is not how hard it is. Hard is fine. Hard can be endured. I’m no spring chicken. I have faced many hardships in life, and I know how to deal with them. What wears on a person is trying to build on unstable ground, especially when you cannot even be sure it is there at all.

When I started, self-publishing was chaotic, imperfect, and often absurd, but it was still legible. You could work, push, and usually see some effect from the effort. A sale meant something. Movement could create more movement. You could feel the machinery respond, however crudely. It was never fair, but it did not feel entirely mute.

People still talk about self-publishing in the language of freedom, and some of that remains true. You can write your book, publish it, and place it before the world without asking anyone’s permission. That chance still matters. It may be the whole reason many of us tolerate the rest of it. The lie was never that success would be easy. The lie was that hard work would produce a readable signal, that if you kept at it long enough, you would be able to tell what was happening, what was working, and where the road might lead next.

That is no longer true in the way it once was, and it comes down to data. Business runs on it. It does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough to make sense of events as they unfold. Good enough to know whether effort matters, whether movement is real, whether a decision changed anything. Without that, you are not really building. You are rolling around in the mud, thinking you are getting somewhere.

That is the condition now. We are all gathered, whether we like it or not, around one enormous marketplace, one place large enough to matter. This market collects a staggering amount of information about books, readers, visibility, clicks, conversion, rank, borrowing, and behavior. It sees everything. It knows more than any writer ever could from the outside. And from all of that, the writer gets a few moldy breadcrumbs blowing in the wind.

It sounds satirical, but it is also true. The problem is not only that the data offered to us is incomplete. The useful points of connection have been stripped away. Sales data lags. Reporting grows thinner. Metrics feel shakier. Momentum is harder to see. Cause and effect have become faint. The system still records it all. Writers just are not allowed to see enough of it to make sound decisions.

Six years ago, if you got movement, you could usually feel it. You could make a push that led to a sale. A sale could improve your rank. A better rank could improve visibility. Visibility could lead to more sales. The system was imperfect, but there was still a sense that effort could produce momentum. The response was not always dramatic, but it was visible enough that you could learn from it. You could capitalize on it. You could tell when something had happened.

Now, too often, you make a sale and nothing stirs. There is no visible change, no satisfying sense that the effort touched anything downstream. The old chain of consequence has weakened to the point of near-invisibility. Growth is harder, yes, but that is only part of it. The deeper problem is that the feedback has grown so thin you can no longer tell what, if anything, your effort changed.

Once that happens, the emotional reality of the work changes with it. What can a writer actually do with late signals and shaky metrics? Work harder where? Push toward what? Adjust which lever? The old advice is to trust the process, but a process has to be readable before it can be trusted. Instead, writers are left refreshing reports, comparing fragments, and trying to infer the truth from partial information. We are given just enough data to remain anxious and not enough to act with confidence. The visible links between action and outcome have grown so weak that the whole thing begins to feel less like publishing and more like divination.

There is a dark comedy in all this. Writers are often treated as though they are all schemers, and every request for clarity is viewed with suspicion. Of course, there are bad actors. There always will be. But most of us are not asking for a trick. We are not asking for a cheat code. We are asking for a shot: a chance to put our book in front of people, a chance to know whether effort creates movement, a chance to understand enough of the road to walk it without tripping.

That is what feels diminished now. Not simply the difficulty of success, but the visibility of the path itself. It is still possible to get lucky. It is still possible to write something strong and have it find readers. That possibility is what keeps many of us here. But possibility is not the same thing as a functioning path. A lottery ticket is also a possibility, but most of us will never know what it’s like to win.

The old promise was never that hard work guaranteed success. The old promise was smaller and much more important: effort might produce a visible result, and a writer could learn from what happened and build from there. That is the control that made self-publishing viable. That is the promise that feels broken.

When that breaks, something deeper breaks with it. Writers, by nature, tend to answer uncertainty with more labor. We work harder. We revise. We push again. We try once more. What else can we do? But when the line between effort and outcome becomes unreadable, hard work starts to feel less like craft and more like ritual. You begin to wonder whether you are building anything at all, or simply performing devotion in a temple that no longer answers. There is real grief in that realization.

The market has always been crowded. Visibility has always been a struggle. The sharper wound is that so much of the usable signal has been taken away while the language of opportunity remains. Most writers I know are not trying to become little merchants obsessed with squeezing every coin from the machine. They want readers. They want the book to leave their desk and enter another mind. Compensation matters, of course. It should. There is real labor involved. Many times, I work harder at this than I do at the job that pays the bills. But before all of that comes the older, simpler desire: to be read.

That is why the loss of data matters so much. It is not merely an inconvenience or just a financial issue. It is the loss of the trail. The loss of feedback. The loss of any clear sense that the work is traveling.

So, this is my six-year retrospective. Self-publishing still offers freedom at the point of creation. It still offers the possibility, however diminished, that a book might find its people. But it no longer feels like a place where honest effort produces honest signals. It feels like a place where immense knowledge is gathered overhead while the people doing the actual risking are handed scraps and told to navigate by faith.

I do not think that is bitterness. I think it is an observation.

However, at a certain point, a writer has to stop arguing with the reality of it. It is what it is. For so long, I hated that expression, but the older I get, the more I find myself using it and the more it lands. So, we put a pin in it. Name it plainly. Clear out the noise. Stop expecting clean signals from a system that no longer seems interested in providing them. Then, we return to the only part that still belongs to us.

The writing.

Cheers!