Amy Webb’s new memoir, “Data: A Love Story,” charts her painfully funny journey through the algorithmic wilderness of online dating to a fairy-tale ending. The tech-savvy writer describes how she analyzed and outwitted the dating websites, creating fake profiles of her ideal men and shaping her own profile to snare the person she was looking for. We spoke with Amy about dating, data, and what it’s like to share your romantic horror stories with the world.

You focus a great deal on math in the book, but your system – inventing ten “ideal men”­ – was also creative, like writing characters in a novel. Did you think about this as a creative project?

I’m clear in the book that I’m not a mathematician – I’m a math fan-girl – but I believe that even in the hard sciences, you have to be extremely creative to be successful. Some people look for the path of least resistance; I look for the path of extreme creativity, even when I was thinking, “This is ridiculous, there has to be an easier way to find the right person.”

Your research reveals that it’s best to withhold information in your online dating profile, but you’re very open about yourself in the book. Did you feel tempted to hold back?

I usually get the opposite question: “Did you embellish, did you really go three days in a row not showering and just working [on the dating project]?” But why would I make that up? Yes, sometimes I go on work benders and I lose track of time and space and reality; the same thing happened when I was writing the book. I didn’t want to hold back: As long as I’m going to write a memoir, I might as well be open and honest.

There’s a reason, though, why I held back online, and I’ve gotten some criticism for allegedly saying that women shouldn’t talk about their accomplishments [in their dating profile]. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I have a complicated job to explain: I work in digital strategy, and I have a solid list of professional accomplishments, but my target number of words was ninety-seven. If I try to explain what I do, at least fifty of those words are going to get taken up explaining my job. It wasn’t about holding back on my accomplishments; it was about maximizing what I knew would work.

You also make the good point that for many people, the last thing they want to do on a date is talk about work.

My husband and I are both live-to-work people, but lots of people are working in order to live. The number of people who thoroughly enjoy work, and would rather work than do anything else, including hang out with their friends — that’s a small percentage of the population. In the U.S. it’s also a rough time now for a lot of people, so you want to be sensitive to that.

Which comes back to your key lesson about the dating profile: It’s all about making yourself seem like a fun, relaxed, easy person to be with.

Which I am! I am a fun, relaxed person to be around. But if you read my bio, I don’t seem that way.

You came up with this system about eight years ago. Has anything changed in the world of online dating?

When I set out to write the book about a year ago, I did a tremendous amount of research. My assumption was that a lot of things would have changed, but it turned out they hadn’t. If anything, from a usability point of view, most of the sites have gotten worse; the number of questions and the amount of content on the site is oppressive. A lot of the sites are now encouraging cross-linking with other social networks, like Facebook – and man, if you want to send people running for the hills, force them to log in to Facebook to use your dating website!

I went through and created new profiles on all the accounts, and I realized that they haven’t really solved the basic problem, which is that they ask users to enter all this information about themselves, but people don’t have the ability to be truly objective. The sites should be focusing on who you want. They should force people to make lists, like I did, and then match people by their requests, rather than on what their favorite books are.

Because you are much less likely to lie about what you want than about who you are.

Exactly. It seems like a pretty easy fix, but the only site that has come close to doing that is OKCupid. The sites haven’t evolved much, but then, from a business point of view, they don’t have to.

Have you had any response to the book from JDate, the site you used the most?

No. I think if my argument had been, “Online dating doesn’t work, the algorithms are stupid, and it’s hurting our society,” I think I would have gotten a response. But my argument actually is that online dating is a fantastic way to meet people – you just have to go into the process understanding how they work, and having a good system for yourself.

What about the response from readers? What has that been like?

I’m actually in the process of compiling data about that. We’ve been collecting all the tweets, emails, and comments on sites like Amazon, and overwhelmingly the response has been positive. A lot of people are reading it less like a memoir and more like a how-to guide, which is not how I wrote it, but that’s fine. It makes me happy that people are using the book and finding solutions to problems. I’ve heard that on Valentine’s Day groups of women in Atlanta and Boston are having a “list party.” They’re going to get together and drink some wine, and create their own lists [about the people they want to meet], with the comfort of having their friends around them.

What about people who say that romance is about spontaneity, serendipity, accident – not lists?

Well, I tried that. It’s the first chapter of the book [Webb meets a boyfriend by chance in an airport]. Even when that relationship was going sour, people would say, “You have this amazing Hollywood story!” That’s all well and good, but I’ve got to live with this guy every day, and I don’t see how this is going to work in fifty years. If serendipity led you to your mate, and you’re now blissfully happy, that’s wonderful, but I work with numbers, I work with strategy. Serendipity, or “wait and see if something happens!” is not a strategy.

You don’t have endless time.

There’s plenty of room for spontaneity, romance, and chemistry, once you get going, but this process for me was about getting out of the endless cycle of bad dates, and finding the right person. If you’re going to go through the process of online dating, don’t rely on the algorithms to set you up with somebody, which for the most part are only looking at Zip code.

What was your husband’s experience with online dating? Did he also have that endless series of bad dates?

He says I totally ruined online dating for him, because he was going on all kinds of dates: Some were good, some were bad, but he was just happy going out a lot. And then I came along. After the first date, that was it for both of us.