The Professional Podcast Network
11359 Deborah Snyder-12 02 24-Book Publisher-Jon
Welcome to the Professional Podcast Network, where brilliance meets business, elevate your brand, and supercharge your revenue with inspiring insights and innovation. And we're back. You're listening to PPN, where we bring you talk with interesting business people from all walks of life. I'm your host, John Starr, and up next we are talking with Debra Snyder. Debra is the founder and co-owner of Synergetic Press, book publishing company. And they're based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and London, England. Welcome, Debra, to our show today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you so much for being here. So Synergetic Press, and based in Santa Fe, in London, tell us all about the publishing company, how you got started, and the types of books you specialize in. Well, thank you. We had started in 1984, back in a period of time when book publishing was a very different operation. I've seen it go through very different generations. Now we're in the digital age. So it's almost a nostalgic industry. I started publishing books about the biosphere, The Theory of the Biosphere by Vladimir Ranoski, the Russian Ukrainian, who wrote about how all the world is connected. The biosphere, which is a sphere of 70 miles of life. It's a thin layer of life that circles the planet. And so I became exposed to some of these ideas about global ecology and biospheric back in the early 80s. And I began to publish books about these subjects and took my small independent publishing company to the States and became involved with the Biosphere 2 project. I don't know if you heard about that, but I began publishing more books about global ecology and how can you design a small world in miniature for Biosphere 2 project in Arizona. And that was during the 80s and 90s. Then I continued here in Santa Fe, New Mexico to publish books about ethnobotany and the way people use plants for medicine and for architecture and for building materials from the Amazon. And so I got very much involved in the ethnobotany and plant medicine. And then during the last decade, we've had a renaissance of plant medicine research with psychedelic medicine. And I began to publish books with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, that's known as MAPS, and with transform press, people that have been working on medicines that can really help people in the world to deal with trauma, both depression and things like that. And that end of life dying, that kind of those kinds of medicines. So there's been not a lot of books published about these subjects over the years, and so I kind of helped build that void. Fascinating topics. And how did you kind of get started in these areas of publishing, I mean, again, they're fascinating topics, but what sort of drew you to them to focus on these areas in your publishing business? Well, it was primarily because there was nobody publishing about these subjects. These were not topics that your conventional book publishers would touch. The Ayahuasca, the use of Ayahuasca in the Amazon region for thousands of years, for example. So these were books that I felt the Ayahuasca reader came to my attention, which is the most comprehensive collection of writings on the subject. This is a vine from the Amazon that's been used as a diagnostic tool for centuries. And nobody knew about it in the West, it became popularized, but nobody really knew and understood the traditional ways that these substances are used. So my work is to help to educate and to inform people with the depth of knowledge and understanding that we have about a lot of the way people use these plants, and then also, you know, the whole war on drugs made it very, very difficult for anybody to understand about the recreational use of many substances. And so because of that lack of information, lack of publications, you know, it's better to have an informed public. Absolutely. And I mean, these are very poignant topics, I guess, would be the word. I mean, when you talk about the biosphere, I mean, with all the things that we hear about, you know, going on on the planet right now, the ecological issues, the ways in which we're damaging our planet. These are things that, you know, we need to be, as you say, we need to have a more informed public than I think we do. And of course, you know, you're talking about end-of-life issues also with another area realm that you've, you know, you've gotten into, and that's also something that I know a lot of people find interesting, not just interesting, but something that they need to learn about to cope with. I mean, the eventuality of the end-of-life and how to deal with it, what to expect, how to prepare for it. So I mean, these are very interesting topics that you've chosen to focus on, I will say. And I'm sure there are many listeners, myself included, who would love to read some of these books that you've published, how can we reach out to you for more information? CinegeticPress.com, we have a newsletter, a website. Our books are available through any bookstore. You can go to your local bookstore, and you could request a copy. We're distributed by Ingram, the largest book distributor in the world. So we finally made it to a point where we can actually reach the market. So these ideas from the '80s that I began, you know, what is, how is it that we became so far removed from nature? How is it that we as a human species have to actually read a book about, you know, how to get back into nature? So our alienation from, alienation from nature has led to what I call a biospheric predicament where the human species, we live in the Anthropocene, which is an era, an epic of life where it's a geological epic where humanity has become the most dominant geological force on the planet. And now that's why our biosphere is in such a tenuous situation because we've given rise to a technosphere, the sphere of technology around the planet. So these books are ways to give an idea, an idea to have a conversation about these challenges that we face and what solutions, what are some of the solutions that we have to the challenges. So I like to give rise to a new kind of community of planetary stewards to solutionaries. And these ideas that we publish are experiential, they're from people that have been doing. And so we want to showcase the people that are working on regenerative approaches to integrating the human life, technology with the biosphere, where we can design a technology that lives and works with harmony with nature, so that we have a reciprocal maintenance and the indigenous ways, those are important to be incorporated into our modern society. Really, really fascinating stuff. Deborah, we're almost out of time, but I mean, there's so much that comes to mind that I'd like to ask you about. I hope maybe you'll come back again and talk with us sometime. Well, thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to let people know about what we're doing, it's a big world out there. It sure is. And in the meantime, I wish you only the best with the publishing business going forward. Thank you so much. All right. You take care now. Okay. Bye now. Bye bye. And to all our listeners, don't go away, we'll be right back after this short break. Welcome to the Professional Podcast Network, where brilliance meets business, elevate your brand, and supercharge your revenue with inspiring insights and innovation. (upbeat music)