What Do you Stand For

(I'm delighted to be guest posting over at teh Alliance of Independent Authors' Self-publishing advice blog)
 
I get why writers resent the question: “What do you stand for?” You can understand it in two ways. First, it sounds like a segue into a discussion of branding and marketing, and both of those are somewhat distasteful topics. And in a way it is about this. In a way.
Second, many of us feel that what we write and who we are are two fundamentally

different things, and asking a writing “what do you stand for?” feels like it’s eroding that essential boundary between the private and the public.
I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable (ah, well, I think we know that’s a lie – a lot of us *need* to be made to feel uncomfortable, especially when it comes to art. But not in a bad way!) but I want to throw some things out there to go away and think about. I will be talking about all of them in some detail over the coming weeks either here or at my new blog The Cynical Self-publisher. For now, I’ll leave it at concrete suggestions and hinted reasons and hope to get you thinking:
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(read the complete article here)