Someone wrote a song about me! About me!

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Spotify recently added podcasts to its offerings. Wondering if my podcast, Boy vs. Girl, had been added, I asked Alexa, our Amazon Echo, to play Boy vs. Girl.

She told me that she couldn't find it on Spotify.

Then I asked her to play "Matthew Dicks," hoping it might pick up my name as one of the hosts of the podcast. 

"Playing Matthew Dicks on Spotify."

Then Spotify began playing a song about me. 

You can imagine my shock. Also my glee. 

It's a song produced by the Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library in conjunction with a TEDx Talk I gave in Somerville back in 2014 about the importance of saying yes.

I had no idea it existed. I was fairly exuberant about its existence. Elysha was also exuberant but became less so as I continued to play the song and express my excitement, pride, and lust for the tune.

I may have become insufferable in the span of about 15 minutes.

Still, a song about me! Mistakenly discovered on Spotify! I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

When you put things out into the world (in this case, a TEDx Talk), you never know what will come back to you. 

Amazon’s new policy on book reviews did not impact me thanks to the quality of my friends and family.

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You may have heard that Amazon has a new policy when it comes to online book reviews. From a piece in The New York Times:

Giving raves to family members is no longer acceptable. Neither is writers’ reviewing other writers. But showering five stars on a book you admittedly have not read is fine.

After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months.

Upon reading this,I immediately clicked over to Amazon to see the damage that this new policy had inflicted upon the reviews of my books.

Then I remembered: 

My friends and family don’t review my books on Amazon. Or anywhere else.

MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND currently has 131 reviews (a 4.3 average), and with the exception of my mother-in-law, I don’t think a single review came from a personal friend or family member.

SOMETHING MISSING currently has 81 reviews (a 4.1 average), and I don’t think  any of my friends or family members, including my mother-in-law, reviewed this book.

UNEXPEXTEDLY, MILO currently has a slightly anemic 25 reviews (a 4.2 average), but since there were so few reviews, I took the time to scroll through them all and did not recognize any of the names as being friends or family. 

While it may seem like I’m complaining about the loyalty and support of friends and family (and I sort of am), I also take a lot of pride in the fact that none of the reviews of my books on Amazon, Goodreads or anywhere else have been given by friends or family members, nor have I ever solicited a review from anyone.

It’s great to know that I’m doing just fine on my own, since I am apparently doing this on my own.