I like your work, but I don't like you

In a recent post I discussed how the walls between personal and professional life are falling down due to social media.  In a continuation of this thread I would like to look at another area where this disappearing divide is changing our impressions of people.  I am a writer, and I have a number of stories published on Amazon, but if you looked at my social media accounts or this blog it might be a little difficult for you to know that.  The reason I don't share my work on here is because for the most part I like to keep that side of my life professional and this side personal.

In much the same way that I feel employers should be limited in how much of a person's private life they allow to influence decisions they make concerning that employee, I also feel there's a limit to how much a reader should know about an author.  There's a very big difference for me between being a fan of someone and being a fan of their work and the two don't always go hand in hand. 

For a start there are quite a few authors who I enjoy reading specific titles from but I do not go beyond those titles.  As an example Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code; while I like The Da Vinci Code as a book and the movie adaptation, I don't like Dan Brown as an author beyond this title.  I have tried to read other books by him and the only one of interest was Angels and Demons but I preferred the movie adaptation, the book felt too similar to The Da Vinci Code to get engrossed in it.  I also tried reading Digital Fortress, something which took me months to complete for the simple reason that the author's lack of knowledge on the subject matter was excruciatingly painful to read.  The only reason I finished it in the end was because there aren't many books I don't read the whole way through to give it a chance, even if I think it's crap, it has to be crap in the extreme for me to abandon it.

Beyond other works these people have created however, a lot of the time their social media accounts branch out and show you glimpses of other parts of their lives.  Taste in music, movies, games, among other less controversial topics as well as the controversial topics such as politics, and personal opinions on contentious issues.  I find when it comes to content creators and their content I like to draw a line between the two and try not to cross it.  I try to draw that line with myself too which is why there are no links to my books here on this blog and why I don't share them on twitter.  I have only shared links to them with people who have expressed an interest privately.

This post came about mainly due to some of the political views expressed by authors on twitter and the assertion that I would agree with them because I liked their work, which to be clear is not the case.  Which in many ways I think is a pity because if I had discovered them as a person first, I probably would have never explored their work which brings us back to the original post on personal vs professional life.  In many ways as an employer uses the internet to find background on a potential employee and then judges whether they should hire them based on what they find rather than their actual work, the same thing applies to content creators online.  Readers are your potential employers since they buy your work to consume it, so what they find online will influence their decision.  You could write the best story in the world, if many people disagree with your political opinions they'll never bother reading your work. 

Being able to dismiss this as a non-issue is only something you can do if you are either already widely known, or if you have no desire to be so.  It's like a small business starting out, when they are new every single review matters, a single one-star review can bring your reputation right down to nothing.  A McDonald's with 10,000 reviews spread across the board is not going to be impacted by a handful of negative reviews, but an independent burger company starting out will be impacted heavily by low reviews.  Whether you like it or not when you are an author your name is your brand, and everything you do under that name impacts that brand (which is why I use a pen name when publishing).  You should learn a lesson from the business world.  There have been numerous high profile cases of businesses throwing their brands behind political parties or political positions and paying the price afterwards for example Chick-fil-a or Chipotle.