US self-published books per year

The Shenzhen billionaire and the Iowa novelist with a Kindle account, climbing the same staircase. One is buying ports, the other is laying out chapter headings in Microsoft Word at 11pm. Forbes counts them both. Statistics, magnanimously, does not distinguish.

Forbes' count of Chinese billionaires rose from a few dozen in 2010 to several hundred by 2020, tracking the country's tech and property booms before recent downturns. Self-publishing in the US grew on a different runway, lifted by Amazon KDP, falling per-title cost, and the post-2008 explosion of side hustles. Both are stories about platforms lowering the cost of entry to a market that used to require gatekeepers. One platform sells everything; the other helps you write a book about it.

Different ladders, both reaching higher than expected. The barrier to entry kept falling. The number of entrants kept rising.