US self-published books per year

It turns out that as NASA's budget has gently risen and fallen over the past fourteen years, so too has the number of Americans who decided their unpublished manuscript about a wizard detective was finally ready to meet the world, and these two phenomena have done so in near-perfect lockstep, which suggests either that funding space exploration directly inspires people to self-publish, or that the universe has a sense of humor so dry it makes a Martian look effusive.

What's probably happening here is that both metrics are being pulled along by the same invisible rope: economic recovery after 2010, technological democratization (better publishing platforms, cheaper hardware, faster internet), and a general cultural shift toward entrepreneurialism and personal expression that touched government and garage alike. Between 2010 and 2024, self-publishing went from technically possible to practically inevitable, much as the American economy went from recovering to recovering again; meanwhile NASA, that most reliable of government agencies, saw its budget wobble between 17 and 25 billion dollars depending on which way Congress was facing that Tuesday. Both rose because both could, not because one caused the other, though you'd need to have lived through the actual decade—when broadband finally became fast enough to download publishing software, when tablets became cheap enough to write on, when the phrase 'I'm self-publishing my novel' stopped getting a sympathetic pause—to feel how naturally they moved together.

So here we have two datasets moving in flawless harmony while remaining completely indifferent to each other, which is either a lesson about how many things move together when economic winds blow the right way, or evidence that pattern-seeking is so fundamental to human cognition that we'll correlate a space agency with a publishing revolution and feel vindicated. The question isn't whether these are connected—they're obviously not—but why we find it so satisfying to discover that they are. Perhaps the universe isn't laughing. Perhaps we are.