It's the American Library Association's annual Banned Books Week, and, once again, I've been screwed by the conspiracy of silence among religious fanatics.
Let's face it--there's no better ad for your work, especially if you write YA fiction, than having some bluenose say your work is not appropriate for teens to read. This is obviously catnip to rebellious teens, but it also causes your entire fan base to rise up and spread the word about how your book is being unfairly banned. You get to post urgent messages on Twitter about your plight as a champion of free expression, and everyone retweets them to show that they, too, support free expression, thus guaranteeing lots of free advertising for your work.
There are several YA authors currently having the kind of awesome publicity storm that only accrues from a book challenge, but I would like to point out that I am not one of them.
Clearly my books are so dangerous, so transgressive, so incredibly subversive, that the outraged parents and school superintendents of America have gotten together and agreed that the best way to suppress my work is to keep it relatively obscure by refusing to challenge it.
So I ask you, my fans and supporters, to rise up against this terrible injustice! Call and write your local nutjobs and demand that they demand that local schools and libraries remove my gay-friendly, sex-positive, teen-drinking-doesn't-actually-kill-most-people, secular-humanist, profanity-ridden fiction immediately!
