North Atlantic right whale population estimate

As the North Atlantic right whale population declined from roughly 500 individuals in 2010 toward approximately 340 by 2021, the number of self-published books rose from hundreds of thousands to over two million annually, achieving a correlation of negative 0.97. It is unclear whether the whales are aware that their disappearance is being documented in inverse proportion to the number of novels being written about discovering yourself through loss. They are probably not. They have other problems.

North Atlantic right whale numbers have declined steadily due to entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes, and climate-driven changes in prey distribution, dropping from an estimated 500 in 2010 to around 340 by 2021. Self-publishing exploded over the same period, enabled by Amazon KDP, Smashwords, and other platforms that removed traditional gatekeepers, growing from roughly 300,000 titles in 2010 to over 2 million by 2021. One trend reflects an ecological crisis; the other reflects a democratized publishing revolution. Both arcs are real, significant, and causally unrelated.

A species in decline and an industry in growth can describe perfectly opposing lines, and in doing so, describe nothing about each other at all. The correlation is a coincidence with stakes on one side.