PVPF 2024

Book Bans are on the Rise, and many Authors are Suffering Emotionally as a Result

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sparks a debate with the "Call Me Max" book image during an event in March 2022
on Oct 05, 2023

In March 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came onstage with a blown-up poster board version of a page from the picture book "Call Me Max."

The image on the page depicted a toddler lying on their stomach on the grass close to a dozing dog. The child looked thoughtful, their hand resting on their cheek.

"When I was born, my parents exclaimed, 'It's a girl!'"

I saw a female when I looked in the mirror.

In a way.

But, as a transgender person, I wanted to see a male."

DeSantis pointed to the page as an example of a book that wasn't "appropriate for any place, but especially (not) in the state of Florida."

Minutes afterwards, he signed Florida's "Parental Rights in Education" measure, also dubbed as the "Don't Say Gay" bill by its detractors, which prohibited sexuality and gender identity education in kindergarten through third grade. (Earlier this year, the state amended the statute to prohibit the teaching of such subjects in all public schools until the 12th grade.)

The bill's passage made global headlines, infuriating anti-censorship parents and encouraging others to fight for similar causes in their children's schools. As a result, books like "Call Me Max" have been challenged or outright removed from schools and libraries in Florida and other states — and while some believe book bans increase book sales, authors claim they have a negative impact on their careers.

Kyle Lukoff, author of "Call Me Max" and the Newbery Honour book "Too Bright to See," among other books, claimed the national publicity did little to no good for "Max." Instead, it introduced his work to people who wish to have it removed from school and library shelves.

"I've had this said to me many times — 'I wish my book would get banned because that's the best way to get it on the best-seller list,'" Lukoff said during a telephone interview. "That certainly never happened for me."

According to Lukoff, he has not yet received royalties from "Call Me Max" or the other two volumes in the trilogy. His advances were $2,500 per book, and he won't be paid royalties until all of them had repaid their advances.

Lukoff's experience, as well as the experiences of hundreds of authors whose works were banned in the previous school year, contradicts a common mantra among some authors and anti-censorship advocates that banning a book leads in a sales increase.

"When books get banned, even when authors do see a spike in sales, it is much more devastating for careers in the long run," Lukoff stated. "If your book is kept out of libraries and schools in entire states — that does translate to a long-term consistent drop in sales."

According to Phil Bildner, a children's book author and writer champion, "having a book banned is not a badge of honour."

"I don't think most people understand how financially devastating this book banning era is for queer authors and authors from marginalised communities," said Bildner, who manages the Author Village, a nonprofit that represents authors and artists for school visits.

"And I know most people don't grasp the emotional toll it's having on the authors in the crosshairs."

The present book ban movement is larger, faster, and more widespread.

Until recently, a list of banned novels included both old favourites like "The Catcher in the Rye," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "The Bluest Eye" as well as modern favourites like "The Hate U Give" and "Thirteen Reasons Why."

However, book bans have increased in the last year. According to PEN America, an organisation that advocates and protects authors', journalists', and other communicators' First Amendment rights, over 3,300 books were banned in the 2022-2023 school year, a 33% rise from the previous school year. According to PEN America's September report on school book bans, these bans "overwhelmingly" target novels addressing race and prejudice, as well as books featuring LGBTQ characters.

Moms for Liberty and LaVerna in the Library, an offshoot of Utah Parents United, are making concerted efforts to prohibit dozens of books at once. These organisations publish detailed lists of books that include what they consider inappropriate material. Rated Books and BookLooks assess books based on their content and highlight potentially offensive parts on their websites, posting entire pages out of context.

Individuals with a lot of clout have also had a lot of influence when it comes to book bans: the Washington Post reported in May that 60% of book challenges in the 2021-2022 school year originated from only 11 persons. Larger organisations also offer advice on how to get books banned and what to say at school board meetings – often, parents will read "controversial" sections aloud.

"When we look at books and obscenity, we have to look at the whole book," Tasslyn Magnusson, a Freedom to Read programme specialist at PEN America who tracks banned books and works with authors whose works have been taken from schools and libraries, said.

Magnusson cited literature such as "Speak," Laurie Halse Anderson's highly criticised novel about a raped high schooler who works through her pain in an art class, and George M. Johnson's "All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto," which contains scenes of sexual assault. Sexual content, explicit language, and unpleasant content may exist in those works, but Magnusson believes they are appropriate in context.

According to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, parents have the choice to choose certain books for their children while avoiding others. nevertheless "no one group, no one parent should dictate what's available for other families," she stated.

"Everyone (deserves) the freedom to find a wide range of ideas in a library — they're there to serve everyone in a community," she continued.

Bans sometimes increase sales, but they frequently do not.

Many of the authors interviewed stated that a book ban can increase sales - Angie Thomas, the author of "The Hate U Give," has stated that every time the book is banned in a school district, "the sales in that area skyrocket."

This was the case with "Maus," Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel on the Holocaust. In January 2022, a Tennessee school board prohibited the title due to "inappropriate words" and a partially covered image of a naked lady. Protesters purchased "Maus" in droves, causing it to be backordered for months. It topped Amazon's best-seller list, and BookScan, a publishing industry tool that measures book sales across the country, claimed that sales of "Maus" increased by 753% during the first and last weeks of January.

However, authors claim that skyrocketing sales are uncommon, and that it is becoming increasingly rare now that hundreds of books are being banned at once.

"It's hard to explain why it works when it works, but it's a fluke — it's not the pattern," Magnusson stated. "The pattern is that this has a devastating impact on current and future income."

According to Magnusson, libraries and schools account for a significant portion of all children's literature sales. So, if libraries across a state, particularly those in states with major school districts, choose not to purchase a book, it may essentially put a book out of print, according to Lukoff.

According to BookScan and the Association of American Publishers, they do not have granular enough data to provide insight into how book bans effect following sales.

When a group or a parent decides to ban a book, they frequently target both well-known titles and works by independent publishers or authors with less name recognition. Books by lesser-known authors, such as Juno Dawson's "This Book is Gay" or Mike Curato's "Flamer," are sometimes packed with bestsellers, such as "Speak" or John Green's "Looking for Alaska," both of which have been turned into films.

Those less well-known works may not appear in a bookstore or library's banned books display, according to Samira Ahmed, an author whose 2019 book "Internment" was "soft banned," or taken off school shelves without a legal challenge.

The sheer amount of banned works makes a "Maus"-style breakout practically improbable. According to PEN America, there were over 1,400 book bans in Florida alone last school year. Building a movement to acquire all of them as a show of solidarity, according to Lukoff, is not conceivable.

"(A book ban) would make news, and people would say, 'I'll buy this book just to show them,'" said Lukoff of the once-common outcome of book bans. "Now that it's an entire movement (to ban books)… that's not a sustainable response."

When novels for children do not sell well in school districts, they are unlikely to be published in paperback, according to Lukoff. "Books just kind of disappear."

Author possibilities, ranging from school visits to future publications, can become scarce.

Writing novels for children is neither glamorous or dependable job, according to Magnusson. While advance rates for picture books and middle-grade novels are generally unknown to the general public, she has heard from authors whose advances are a few thousand dollars — around the same as Lukoff's for the "Max" series — and many of those advances haven't paid off.

"It's not a lucrative job by any means," she stated.

Because publishing alone does not guarantee a consistent income, many authors who write for children rely on school visits and other paid appearances at literary conferences or libraries to supplement their income, according to Magnusson. Some of the offers were cancelled or never made this school year: Ahmed said her number of school trips has decreased to three this year; Bildner said some LGBT authors he knows have reduced their visits to three or four per year, down from 20 to 30 in the past.

"These opportunities, particularly for LGBTQ authors, are now virtually nonexistent," Bildner said of sponsored visits.

Being prohibited might also have a negative impact on an author's future possibilities. According to Caldwell-Stone, publishers may be apprehensive of purchasing a manuscript from an author whose works have been labelled as "controversial."

Lower-profile authors may find it much more difficult to overcome these bans, according to Lukoff, especially without the support of a large publishing house or the name recognition of authors like J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, or Art Spiegelman.

"Everyone knows about 'Maus,'" he explained. "It's much harder for a random queer or trans person or a person of colour whose debut has just gotten swept up in all of this."

And, according to Caldwell-Stone, publishers may be less willing to award contracts to new authors whose subjects have been deemed problematic, such as race and racism or LGBTQ life.

"There are definitely fears that now putting money into books that are likely to get banned is a losing proposition financially for publishing houses," Lukoff stated. "It makes an already hard proposition that much harder."

Bans have an emotional impact on authors.

Because the market for books about topics like racism and LGBTQ life is uncertain, authors may decide not to write at all, or to write about something other than what they're passionate about, according to Torrey Maldonado, author of "What Lane?" which has been cited frequently as a useful guide to antiracism for young people.

"There are authors and illustrators who think, if this is going to be blocked, maybe I should do something else, or maybe I should create something else," added Maldonado. "Book banning threatens to stamp out people's fire."

"It's taken so much work to begin to shift publishing to be more representative of who people are," said Magnusson. "That work has been severely attacked here."

And some of the parents who have challenged these books at school boards have targeted the authors themselves. Ahmed claimed she knows other authors who have been "doxxed, threatened, and called horrific slurs" by detractors.

"People who specifically create a career to write for young people, they're spending so much time thinking about their audience — 'What did I not have to read when I was a young person?'" Magnusson explained. "Children's authors, especially, spend so much time connecting to their inner child, that to be called 'paedophiles,' 'sexual deviants,' sent hate mail — that has a psychological and emotional impact that is pretty profound."

When Ahmed writes expressly for young people, she calls it a "slap in the face" to have her work labelled as profane or filthy.

It's also exhausting for authors who didn't intend to battle book bans on a frequent basis. Lukoff stated that his first high-profile book bans occurred in early 2021, in Austin and Salt Lake City, when book bans first became popular. He claims that the number of bans has "only gotten worse," and that it has begun to define his career.

"It is so unrelenting," he remarked. "I'm not surprised that my books have been banned; I'm surprised this has become a much larger, inescapable political movement."

Book restrictions are harmful to both readers and authors.

Book prohibitions are not new, according to Maldonado.

They are a political instrument of dominance, he claims, used to repress certain voices and points of view, particularly those of people of colour or who identify as LGBTQ.

"It's not just our work being condemned, it's us, personally, it's our identities," Ahmed stated. "The very real goal of book bans is to erase identities from the shelves — a campaign led by fear and hate — under the guise of 'parental rights.'"

According to Magnusson, the reaction to book bans could cause publishers to take a significant step back in terms of supporting inclusive writing.

"It's taken so much work to begin to shift publishing to be more representative of who people are," said Magnusson. "That work has been severely attacked here."

According to Ahmed, those who suffer the most when a book is banned are the authors who write for children and the youngsters who may never get the opportunity to read those works at their classrooms or local libraries.

"There have been thousands of challenges across America, and what that actually means is that young people are being denied the opportunity and access to these books," she stated.