Lillian and her husband Dave are the team behind Brummet Media Group, high-fiving cheerfully as they pass each other on the way from checking off one item or other from their long to-do list. Their business includes Dave’s drum studio and percussion repair services, numerous award-winning non-fiction books, a YouTube channel and two popular blogs.
Visit the Brummets @: https://taplink.cc/brummet or drop by their Amazon Author page: https://amazon.com/author/lillianbrummet
Nicole: Tell me a bit about yourself and your business.
Lillian: Sure – well now that I’m in the mid-50’s I’m slowing down quite a lot… It takes me longer to get enthusiastic in the morning, and I tire by 3 or 4 PM. (She laughs) Ah the joys of aging. I am an enthusiastic gardener who gets excited about healthy soil. I prefer a clean house, and I don’t like clutter, but day-to-day messes don’t bother me at all. I love dogs, adore coffee, fruit, yogurt and dark chocolate.
Brummet Media Group is our business, which involves: 2 different blogs, 6 published books, a drum teaching studio, a drum repair workshop, and a Youtube channel. The Brummet’s Conscious Blog focuses on inspiring, positive, proactive topics offering a fresh outlook on the world. The Drum It With Brummet blog serves drummers and percussionists. The Brummet Media Channel (Youtube) offers several playlists that share a behind-the-scenes look at being an entrepreneur, author or writer, creating positive change, and a few other topics.
NIcole: Wow! You have so much going on. What is it like to run your business with your husband?
Lillian: It is a true partnership. Dave works the day job to bring in a steady income and the benefits that help us find a balance in life. While he is away I’m responsible for the house, meal, budget and dog duties. I tend to manage social networking, social media, office communications, networking and record keeping. Dave handles taxes, ads, audio, music, images, and technology related tasks. He teaches students, drum repairs and he does all of the in-person events or tasks. I handle most of the marketing, networking, media, blogging and youtube content creation. When it comes to writing I’ll gather data, transcribe content and build up a draft manuscript. After the re-writes and edits, based on discussions we had, he’ll take the manuscript to the next level with proof, edit, format etc. Dave creates our cover designs as well.
Nicole: It’s amazing how you both found your niche in running the business. I can only imagine that sometimes conflict arises about how to manage things and certain decisions. How do you navigate those situations together?
Lillian: Great question and speaks the truth too. In any collaboration there will be moments where one is less than pleased at the level of production, activity or presence of the other. It happens. None of us are at 100% all the time. Schedules, surprise tasks and other priorities that pop up will inevitably cause delays on other projects… as well as pure exhaustion.
The key is to find a place of acceptance, of understanding and always wear a solution-based mind set. Be willing to try it their way with the understanding that another option will be employed should it fail, and if nothing else you’ll both learn what not to do. Perhaps you’ll be pleasantly surprised that their idea brought great results. Maybe you’ll come to a balance, finding a way to incorporate some of those ideas.
When a potential conflict arises, decide what the issue is, whether talking it out will help or hinder the process, whether there is anything you can do to ease the pressure or help out in some way. Find time for fun, for relaxation, for rejuvenation, and for space from one another. Embrace and work with each other’s differences because together you complete the picture.
Nicole: Great tips! You have written a book about book marketing. What has changed in the book marketing landscape that is important for authors to know?
Lillian: In the spring of 2021 we revised the first edition – which was published in 2012. We found that much of the Purple Snowflake Marketing techniques have remained the same, but some of the tools and platforms where those techniques are employed have definitely evolved. There is a heavier emphasis on collaboration and networking and online e-commerce these days, as well… which I love. Between 2012 and 2021 I had taken a lot of e-commerce genre courses helping to improve upon previous skills for using labels, keywords, SEO, categories, online ads and platforms. Dave too learned a great deal about audio and imagery over that decade between editions… and so this experience was also added to the recent revision.
Nicole: Why are business relationships so important for an author?
Lillian: By maintaining and nurturing networking relationships I have connections that go back more than a decade, sometimes 2 decades – with various collaborations and projects going on regularly. Business relations vary in that they are looking at the bottom line – whether they earned something, gained something. So it is super important to be sure to drive traffic their way whenever possible, and then let them know about it.
There are 3 key steps to maintaining business relationships:
- Never make anyone work for anything; have everything you might need for a project ready well ahead of time.
- Follow up
- Be gracious, grateful & polite
Nicole: Great advice! How has writing become a healing tool for you and your husband?
Lillian: Writing has become a tool that we use to create positive change in the world. Empowering others, sharing other people’s life experiences, giving people the inspiration and resources so that they can continue to make a difference in the world. This alone makes me feel like I am playing a role, that I have purpose, that I can affect positive change. My own view of the world becomes larger, less dangerous, less dark. And hopefully our readers feel the same. I have used writing to crawl out of a difficult childhood and heal old emotional wounds. Writing brought me closer to my mother and step-father as I interviewed them at different times for different publications. Writing healed the broken relationship with my mother while we collaborated over the garden book (coming up). Family memoirs are super powerful too, Dave’s father left some writings behind that shared a great deal about what it was like to be an immigrant, what women and other minorities went through just a few generations ago, what the Depression was like, and more. We are sharing these writings in the upcoming trilogy (summer 2023). …Writing is so very powerful.
Nicole: It truly is! You both have published poetry books together. How does your poetry synchronize in a way that makes it work in a book?
Lillian: Dave’s poetry is very different from mine, but we both enjoy playing with words, creating rhythm and rhyme, sharing fictional scenes that leave an impression, or share non-fiction real-life experiences that will evoke an emotional response. We both have a passion for nature, wildlife, gardening, dogs and music – and our poetry reflects that as well.
Nicole: How awesome is that. What have you been working on that you can tell us about?
Lillian: Several things! (She laughs) The past few months (January-March ’23) Dave and I have been working hard at improving the content, look and feel of various social networking platforms, both blogs, and the Youtube channel, as well as the book landing pages. Everything looks so much more modern and less cluttered, I really like how these things have turned out – but it took a lot of time behind the scenes doing research and skill development to get there.
Dave recently created new book and author images for marketing purposes, which are absolutely beautiful and I’m looking forward to using them. Somehow he also found time to create new book trailers for each format of every book we have available – each designed a little differently for the various uses we have planned for videos. They were recently uploaded to our channel and a few on Amazon too. We spent a lot of time updating book SEO and metadata such as: categories, keywords, author pages, relevant links and the like. …As you can see there were a lot of activities going on the last few months!
So now that all of these things are coming to fruition, we are able to concentrate on the upcoming trilogy that I mentioned earlier. We plan to see it published this summer (2023), which of course will be followed by the promotions one does upon a book release.
Other than that… not much (She laughs).
Nicole: Sounds like you have so much going on! Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today!
A good interview.
Thank you William 🙂