US lottery ticket sales

Lottery tickets and self-published novels, both being purchased and produced in growing volumes. Both are bets that something written by yourself might pay out. The odds, in their separate ways, are not in your favour.

US lottery sales doubled across this window thanks to Powerball and Mega Millions jackpot inflation, expanded scratch-off games, and online sales rule changes. Self-published titles per year climbed in parallel as Amazon KDP and falling production costs let anyone publish a book within an afternoon. Both lines reflect the same consumer pattern: small, low-cost transactions where the long tail is enormous and the median outcome is modest. People bought a lot of long shots in this decade, in both formats.

The tail got longer and someone bought every ticket on it. Most decades reward at least a few of the bets.