I love the LGBT community. I love our idealism, our optimism, our faith in a future that will get better. I love that we’re not afraid to stand up and fight to make the future better. I love how we look after our own, take kids in off the streets when their own parents don’t want them anymore, and are prepared to do battle all the way through the highest courts in every land to make our voices heard. I also love our allies, and the wonderful crossover community that is M/M. We are more than a genre, more than a disparate group of individuals. As a collective, we are righteous force to be reckoned with.So when a certain pizza parlour in Indiana said they wouldn’t cater gay weddings (see my earlier post for my thoughts on that story) and within four days was creeping up on $1mil in donations from a GoFundMe campaign to support their brand of bigotry, I knew we could do better.
AJ Rose and Meredith King agreed with me, and together we came up with a plan. We want to gather as many authors as we can from our wonderful community who want to take a stand and give the collective finger to people cashing in on discrimination. We’d like to give something back to the people who are always giving back, we’d like to offer them a small token of thanks. We’d like to offer anyone who donates $5 to an LGBT charity of their choice, or shares a charity’s links and spreads the message, the chance to win an ebook.
Over the last few days, we’ve been contacting every author we know, and they in turn have been contacting their friends. So far we’ve got 125 incredible authors on board, and that number is rising rapidly, but we’d like more. Ideally, we’d like to reward everyone prepared to do something for charity.
So what do you say? Can you spare a copy of an ebook (reader’s choice works best, but we know some authors have publisher restrictions) for a worthy winner as incentive for readers to donate? We need to hear back by Saturday, April 11th (to diversereader at yahoo dot com, author at kateaaron dot com, or ajrosefiction at gmail dot com), for a blog post going up on 18th April at DiverseReader announcing the giveaway and the reason behind the fundraiser.
The day of the post, all we ask is that you share the post link on your various social media to alert your fans of the opportunity, and when the deadline for the giveaway passes, we’ll email you the name of your winner and their email so you can contact them about their prize. It’s easy, hosted in one place for readers to follow and enter, and will show that we mean business.
We want this fundraiser to be as big as we can make it. We want to prove to the naysayers that we have honour and justice on our side, that we’ll look after the people they kick to the kerb, we’ll fight for our rights to live and love equally, and to have equal protections under the law. LGBT people aren’t going anywhere, and our allies have loud voices. Help us use them.
*ETA, we’ve been contacted by some of the review site owners about adding in a gift card for the cost of a single book as incentive as well, and we’d like to say that’s awesome, if those sites are willing to do so. You’ll be emailed just as an author would to handle transfer of the prize to the winner, but we’d like to keep it to the cost of a book per gift card, so as to avoid a sort of lottery situation. Money for donations gets into potential legalities I’m not sure would help the cause.
