Look and Listen

Biography

After four decades of leadership in the home business industry as an author, speaker, and self-publisher, Barbara Brabec has retired from active involvement in the home-business industry but continues to be an inspiring role model for individuals who run any kind of a business based at home.

When widowed in 2005 after nearly 44 years of marriage, Barbara began to reinvent herself on the Web and move in new directions as a writer, editor, and self-publisher. With two self-published business books and six published by the trade between 1979-2006, she published her first memoir in March 2010: The Drummer Drives! Everybody Else Rides–The Life and Times of Harry Brabec, Legendary Chicago Symphony Percussionist and Humoristwith a companion website at TheDrummerDrives.com.

In addition to working on new books and maintaining her websites, Barbara is also active as a book manuscript editor and consultant. She critiques book manuscripts, consults with new self-publishers, and offers a unique Author-Publisher Book Contract Consulting Service that has helped many first-time authors negotiate better terms with a trade book publisher.

Barbara's home business books include Homemade Money (now a two-volume edition); Creative Cash, Handmade for Profit, The Crafts Business Answer Book and Make it Profitable.

Inspiration

When I decided to become a self-employed writer in 1971, I knew I had to focus on writing about what I knew best, which at that time related to my involvement in the crafts industry. My first book, Creative Cash, and its companion newsletter was all about how to make money at home from an art or crafts hobby, something I and many others were trying to do then (and still are today).

As the years passed and I gained experience as a self-employed individual, I moved into then-exploding home-business industry with the publication in 1984 of my ground-breaking book, Homemade Money. The success of this book led to a sideline career as a keynote speaker and workshop leader, with other books soon following, along with a home-business print newsletter I published until 1996. My life as a writer changed dramatically when I set up my first website in 2000, and the many things I learned from that point on have been discussed in one article or another on my personal domain at BarbaraBrabec.com.

I've always been inspired by the people who have populated my writer's life. Over the years, literally thousands of men and women have communicated with me by mail, phone, and email, so networking has always influenced my writing life. My husband, Harry, was also a great inspiration to me, having been the one who first encouraged me to write. Together, we launched a crafts magazine in 1971. While he pursued his own career as a professional musician, he also became my silent partner in business, always there to do "grunt work" so I'd have more time for writing.

When Harry died in 2005, my life changed dramatically, and it was at that point that I decided it was time to write about all the things I'd done and learned in a lifetime of just plain living. (Old writers never die; they just change their subjects.) For years I had been dreaming about writing a different kind of book, but it took me until November of 2009 to realize that I had always had a perfect book just waiting to be written: the story of my unusual life with a drummer named Harry. What began as a simple memoir soon grew to be a major work that not only told the story of my husband's drama-filled life and my not-always-easy life with him, but documented thiry years of an exciting era of Chicago's music history in the process. Of course, Harry was my great inspiration for this book, and one of my next books will be the one he encouraged me to write for years, about the remarkable dog we rescued from the wilds of Missouri and taught to communicate with us.

I have always believed that my strength as a writer is that I have personally experienced all the things I write about. Now in my mid-seventies, I'm trying to do what I've always done best, which is to serve as a role model while educating, encouraging, motivating, and inspiring others to follow in my footsteps.

I believe we all have a story inside us just begging to get out, so if you've ever thought about writing the story of your life, or a little memoir about a particular time, place, or person in your life, I urge you to pursue this dream. I've always believed that we are the most interesting person we shall ever know, and when we're not trying to figure out someone else, most of us spend our lives trying to understand ourselves. As Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once observed, "If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."