Barbara’s Bio
BARBARA BRABEC has long been one of North America’s best-known and most trusted home business advisers and role models. Self employed for most of her adult life, she has been helping individuals achieve personal success and financial independence through a business at home since the early 1970s when she and her husband Harry launched Artisan Crafts magazine for art/craft sellers and shop/gallery owners. Barbara’s personal interest in arts and crafts, coupled with her business experience and the popularity of her home business books, quickly made her a leading authority on how to turn an art or crafts hobby into a profitable homebased business.
After Barbara began to sell her art and handcrafts in local shops and galleries in the mid-1960s, Harry convinced her that they should start a magazine for crafters (Artisan Crafts 1971-1976). Before starting her present writing and publishing business in 1981, Barbara was for two years publisher and general manager of Countryside Books, a division of Barrington Press, Inc., which coincidentally published her first book, Creative Cash (a long story in itself). In this capacity, she was directly responsible for the book’s initial sales success, and it was the overwhelming response to this book that convinced her she should start her own publishing business at home. She launched that business at the age of 42 with a thousand dollars borrowed from savings, ultimately assuming the publishing and marketing responsibilities for her first book. Different editions were later published by other trade publishers.
BETWEEN 1981 AND 1996, Barbara presented dozens of keynote talks and crafts and home business workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Canada while also publishing a subscription periodical for home business owners. It had different names and formats over the years as “life” forced her to adapt and change, giving her what she now thinks of as a “Masters Degree in Adaptability.” During these years, Barbara was also a featured columnist for several magazines, including Creative Crafts, Crafts ‘n Things, The Crafts Report, and Crafts (where her “Selling What You Make/Profits” column ran for twenty years and was the longest-running column of its kind when it had to be ended due to an all rights/electronic rights issue).
Prior to becoming self-employed, Barbara gained much of her business experience while working for ten years in corporate offices in Chicago’s Loop. However, she is entirely self-taught as a writer, publisher, editor, crafts marketing authority, home-business expert, and website designer. She believes that anyone who can read—and apply what they’ve learned—can achieve success in their chosen field. Her greatest strength as a leader and home-business adviser is that she has personally experienced most of the things she writes about.
Over the years, Barbara has been quoted in countless newspaper and magazine articles, and articles by and about her have been published in dozens of small-business periodicals and on numerous websites. Barbara’s chapter on how to write for the crafts industry appeared in The Complete Guide to Writing Nonfiction (Writers Digest Books), and her professional viewpoints have been included in several books by other authors. She has given dozens of radio interviews, and has appeared on several TV shows, including ABC-TV’s HOME show, where she appeared as a week-long guest expert on their “Homemade Money series” titled after her best-selling home business book. She has also been a guest on the Carol Duvall show on HGTV.
IN 1999-2000, she was the Series Editor for Prima Publishing’s line of For Fun & Profit™ books and also a featured content provider for IdeaForest.com, a short-lived eCommerce site that didn’t survive the dot-com crash of 2001. This experience, however, forced Barbara onto the Web and into a website of her own, a move she had been steadily resisting for several years because she felt too old to “learn all that new stuff” when she was still using a DOS-computer and doing email through Web-TV.
Since then, Barbara has been very active on the Web, writing for her website and ezine readers, building new websites for her eBooks, and offering small business telephone consultations and editing and consulting services to authors who plan to publish their own books. This new blog site is yet another step forward for Barbara, who vowed for years that she would never have a blog. (She has since learned that she needs to quit saying “never.” )
BARBARA WAS MARRIED for nearly 44 years to Harry Brabec, a professional musician and crafts show producer who died in February, 2005. He assisted her in her business for many years and always kept her laughing. His home-business humor has been included in several editions of Barbara’s books and will ultimately be published in a couple of new non-business books Barbara plans to self-publish. Check the Craftsbiz Humor department for a few samples of his wit, and see Barbara’s loving memorial to Harry here.
