The Four Years My Books Didn't Exist

I've written about the Amazon years before. The money, the 100+ books on the platform, the overnight block. I've written about the rebuild too. The three websites, the zero-cost stack, the decision to go free.

I haven't written about the middle part. The four years where nothing happened.

2020 to 2024. That's a long time to sit with work that nobody can see. I want to be honest about what that was actually like, because the "indie author bounces back" narrative people seem to want from me skips the part that actually matters.

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The block

Amazon blocked my account in 2020. No detailed explanation. No appeals process that led anywhere. Over ₹25 lakhs in unpaid royalties held back. Over 100 books removed from the platform overnight. If you've never had your primary distribution channel shut down without warning, it's hard to explain how disorienting that is. One day you're a published author with readers and income. The next day you're a person with files on a laptop.

I tried Draft2Digital as a backup. They're the next biggest distributor after Amazon for indie authors. Their response (direct quote): "We are a small company for small authors. We cannot support such a huge catalogue."

Read that again. I had too many books. That was the problem. Too productive. Too much output. The system was built for authors who publish one or two books a year. Not someone with over a thousand.

So that was it. Over 1,500 books. No platform. No readers. Just folders on a laptop that nobody except me would ever open.

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What "keeping writing" actually looked like

I kept writing. I want to be clear about why, because it wasn't discipline or grit or any of the words people use in motivational posts. I've been writing since I was 10 years old. I genuinely don't know how to not do it. I've tried stopping. Multiple times. It doesn't work. Writing is apparently not something I choose to do. It's something that happens whether I want it to or not.

But writing without publishing is a strange thing. There's no feedback loop. No one reads it. No one reacts. You finish a book and the reward is... another file in a folder. Another title in a spreadsheet. Another thing that exists only on your hard drive.

The books just accumulated. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. Every month, more finished books. Every month, the same thought: what's the point of this?

I kept a spreadsheet of everything I was writing. Title, genre, word count, date completed. At some point the spreadsheet became depressing to open. Not because the numbers were bad. Because the numbers were fine. I was writing at the same pace I always had. The output was there. The audience wasn't.

If a book exists on your hard drive and nobody can read it, is it a book? I don't mean that in some deep philosophical way. I mean practically. I had written enough to fill a small library and all of it was invisible. All of it was just... files.

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The thing nobody talks about

People ask if I thought about quitting. I think about quitting all the time. Before Amazon, during Amazon, after Amazon. The thinking never stops. Neither does the writing. Those are apparently two separate systems in my brain.

What almost happened during those years wasn't quitting though. It was something worse. It was letting the books become irrelevant. Not deleting them, just... not caring anymore. Not keeping the metadata organised. Not bothering with ISBNs because who cares. Not backing things up carefully because what's the difference.

That's what platform loss actually does to you. It doesn't make you stop creating. It makes you stop caring about what you've already created. And that's scarier, honestly.

Because once you stop caring about the work, the work gets worse. Not immediately. But slowly. The quality of maintenance drops. You stop organising. You stop cataloguing. You stop thinking about the books as things that will eventually find readers. You start thinking of them as relics of a career that didn't work out.

I came close to that. Really close. There were months where opening the folder and seeing the file count go up didn't feel like an accomplishment. It felt like I was hoarding evidence of something that might never work out. Like collecting receipts for a business that doesn't exist.

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Watching from the outside

The world kept moving while my books sat in folders. Self-publishing was booming. Other authors were building careers on the same platforms that had locked me out. Amazon KDP was minting new bestsellers. Draft2Digital grew. BookBub promotions were getting authors thousands of downloads. TikTok was creating viral book sensations overnight.

I watched all of it from the outside with 1,500+ books and nowhere to put them.

That's a specific kind of frustrating that I don't think most people understand unless they've experienced it. Not "I can't create." Worse. "I can create, and it doesn't matter." The problem wasn't talent or output or motivation. The problem was distribution. And distribution was controlled by companies that had decided, for their own reasons, that I didn't fit.

The publishing industry talks a lot about "gatekeepers." Usually they mean traditional publishers who reject your book. Nobody talks about the new gatekeepers: the platforms. Amazon, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark. If they decide you're too much, too fast, too prolific, too anything, your career stops. Not because your books aren't good. Because their system wasn't designed for someone like you.

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What changed

What changed in 2024 wasn't dramatic. There was no breakthrough moment. No investor. No lucky break. The technology for hosting your own content had gotten good enough and cheap enough that you could do it without being a developer. I'm not a developer. Can't code. But tools exist now that let you build things if you know what you want and you're stubborn enough to figure out how.

And I had a very clear picture of what I wanted: a place where every book could live permanently, free to read, under my control. No platform. No middleman. No one who could flip a switch and make it all disappear.

That's what atharvainamdar.com is. Over 100 books published so far, all free to read. Every chapter, every word. No signup, no paywall. The rest are coming. 1,221 titles catalogued and waiting.

The ISBNs came from the Indian government for free. The hosting costs almost nothing. The websites are mine. Nobody can take them down or block them or decide my catalogue is "too large."

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What I actually learned

I don't think those four years made me a better writer. Suffering doesn't do that. That's a lie writers tell each other to make the bad stretches feel meaningful. "The struggle made me stronger." No. The struggle made me frustrated and angry and occasionally hopeless. What it didn't do was stop the writing, because apparently nothing does that.

What those years did give me is extreme clarity about one thing: the books are the only thing that matters. Not the platform. Not the royalties. Not the algorithm. Not the follower count. Not which distributor likes you. Not which publication features you. The books.

Everything else is distribution. And distribution can be rebuilt. I know because I did it. It took four years longer than it should have, but it got rebuilt.

The other thing I learned is that depending on someone else's platform for your entire career is a catastrophic risk. Not a theoretical risk. A real one. It happened to me. Amazon blocked my account with no meaningful recourse. Draft2Digital rejected my catalogue because it was too big. If your livelihood depends on a company that can remove you overnight, you don't have a career. You have a tenancy that can be revoked.

Own your distribution. Own your platform. Own your data. I learned this the hard way. You don't have to.

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What I'd tell someone going through it now

If you're an author or creator who just lost their platform, here's what I wish someone had told me in 2020.

First: the panic is normal. The feeling that everything you built just evaporated is real and valid. Don't let anyone tell you to "just move on" or "start fresh" like it's switching coffee shops. You lost something real.

Second: don't stop maintaining your work. This is the part that almost got me. Keep the files organised. Keep the metadata clean. Keep the backups current. The moment you stop caring about the archive is the moment it starts decaying. And rebuilding from a well-maintained archive is hard. Rebuilding from a neglected one is nearly impossible.

Third: the technology to self-host and self-distribute is better now than it's ever been. You don't need to code. You don't need a technical co-founder. You need patience and stubbornness and a clear picture of what you want. The tools exist. They're affordable. In many cases they're free.

And fourth: the books are still the books. They didn't get worse because a platform dropped you. They didn't become less valuable because nobody's reading them right now. They're waiting. Give them somewhere to go.

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Over 1,500 books. Four years in the dark. Now free to read at atharvainamdar.com.

They existed the whole time. They just needed somewhere to go.