Writer’s Relief has noticed that the age of social media has created a new book publishing industry phenomenon: writers pulling their own books before they hit the shelves. 

Author Jennifer Senior says:

…a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, A Place for Wolves, ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege. 

There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay, often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine.

Read more about teen fiction and “Cancel culture” from this New York Times opinion column.