I was a terrible flute player in the high school band, but I was pretty good at twirling a baton in parades. Only dropped my baton once in a half-time football show. My first successful business was a lemonade stand; my first business failure was a bait shop. I sold night crawlers, but so did the kid down the street and he undercut my prices.

After high school, I attended a technical school and studied Auto Mechanics for a year-and-a-half. (I wanted to see if I could learn how to do something I didn’t know anything about.) I was a whiz at doing brake jobs but when the parts cleaner ate the Positively Pink polish off of my fingernails, I realized this wasn’t the career for me.

When I was twenty-two years old I opened my own restaurant, The Cutting Board. The restaurant was very busy, customers loved my food but so did my employees. They carried it out the back door on a regular basis.  Turns out that owning a restaurant is a tough business.

In 1978 I founded and published In Business, one of the first regional business magazines in the country. After 11 years I sold the magazine and it’s still being published today in Madison, Wisconsin.  During the last eight years of publishing In Business magazine I also started a free lunch program called Meals for Madison.

Gift from meal guest

Every Friday at noon I served a free meal to 125 people. It became a community business adventure, because each week I’d invite a different corporation to send some of their executives to the meal site to help serve the noon meal and then clean up afterwards. Restaurants donated food, presidents of companies wrote checks and once a month high school students cooked the main course in their Home Economics class, and I’d bus them to the meal site so they could serve.

I used to tell people that if I could start a business that brought me as much joy as Meals for Madison and make money doing it, I’d be in heaven. Sometimes you get what you wish for. In June of 1999 I found my little piece of heaven when I launched DearReader.com.

In case you’re not familiar with DearReader, I beg your pardon—and hope you’ll indulge me while I adopt my “commercial voice” (which I’ve been using doing voice-overs since I was being potty trained!) to tell you a little about what I do.

Yes, really—potty trained!  Some people read in the bathroom, but when I was a kid I did commercials. It's a little embarrassing, I don't remember how it got started, but whenever I was “sitting,” I'd reach over, rummage through the vanity drawer by the sink, pull out a bottle of mouthwash or some shaving cream, tilt my head to the side (ever so slightly) smile, hold up the product, look into the imaginary camera and start delivering the advertising copy from the back label using my "commercial voice."

Uh..umm..so here goes:

When you go to DearReader.com you’ll find 11 different book clubs. Sign up today and tomorrow in your email you’ll receive a 5-minute chunk to read from a book in a category of your choosing—mystery, romance, classics, and so on. The next day you’ll receive another 5-minute read. By the end of the week you’ll have sampled enough from the book to know if it’s a good match for you. If it is, head to the library or visit your favorite bookstore. It’s as simple as that.

Oh—and I write a daily Dear Reader column, too.   Most days my column isn’t about books, instead I write about everyday life and the feelings I wrestle with; the embarrassing thing I did yesterday; how I can’t seem to get back in the groove because my mother died and now I feel like an orphan; my morning coffee fairy; the greatest gift my dad ever gave me; and my most memorable New Year’s Eve, when my party dress started shedding. Life is never boring at my house—in fact things are pretty entertaining.

Click for more photos

For a long time I couldn’t understand why people enjoyed reading my daily column so much.  But through the years, I’ve come to realize that by the time readers get to the end of my column, they’re not reading my story any longer, instead they’re reliving one of their own. I end every column with “Thanks for reading with me. It’s so good to read with friends.” And I mean it. I’m at my best one-on-one with people and even though 360,000 people read my column every day they feel like I’ve written it just for them—sittin’ on the sofa just shootin’ the breeze.

Visit DearReader.com and sample books in your email.