McKinney created the PublishingPaidMe Twitter hashtag in June 2020 to highlight racial disparities in writers' advance payments.
[3] The book is the first in the Nightmare-Verse series and is a contemporary retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a Black teenage girl protagonist.
In early 2019 McKinney was one of several writers who used Twitter to criticize the planned publication of Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao due to its treatment of the book's African American characters.
[9][10][11] She developed the hashtag in concert with the worldwide protests related to institutional racism that took place after the murder of George Floyd.
McKinney was inspired by a Tweet from YA author Tochi Onyebuchi asking writers to share advance information for the sake of transparency.