This is slightly off topic for this blog, but I found this ZenHabits post to be deeply profound. To sum it up, virtually everyone fits into a pidgeonhole: the smart guy, the cold physician, the golf hack, the office gossip, the troubleshooter, the troublemaker. It applies to scifi writers too. How many pidgeonholed authors have an opportunity to break out into a different genre? If Terry Brooks tried to write a hard scifi story about alien robot colonies invading Earth would you give him the benefit of the doubt? Many people would not. Most famous people are pidgeonholed: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Brittany Spears....the list is nearly endless.

The best advice is to make sure that your pidgeonhole is a good one. You need a positive image associated with respect and dignity. Because you probably will be stuck in that hole for the rest of your life.