nuance
notes
a world of words
Episode Three
Feature
In conversation with Dianne Dicks Jill Prewett interviews Bergli Books' founder Can you tell a little about how Bergli Books came about? All by accident and on a whim! I was unable to get any of the many publishers I contacted in London or New York interested in the collection of stories I had from writers, journalists, translators and business people about their experiences of living with the Swiss. Everyone here who read these stories wanted copies of them. Since the stories were particularly useful for conversation classes with Swiss people who were learning English, I quickly got fed up copying them for teachers. So I decided to publish them myself and in 1990 founded Bergli Books for that purpose. I could never have dreamed then that in 21 years there would be 30 more new Bergli titles with altogether about 200'000 books printed. But that first book was immediately a tremendous success and people started sending me more manuscripts and then one book led to another. How do you find your clients? Because many of the Bergli titles have been successful here, the word got around. Bergli has a good relationship with distributors and bookshops and many international firms recommend our books to their incoming staff from outside of Switzerland. People find us when they seek more information www.nuancewords.com info@nuancewords.com
All our books appeal to the Swiss themselves who are interested in how they are seen by others or looking for ways to improve their own international communication skills. People usually don't buy books because of an advertisement. Would you? The Bergli titles can be found in major bookshops in Switzerland or direct from us. We receive orders from all over the world through our web site and often have no idea how people found us other than Googling around. What are the advantages of being a small publisher? Bergli is not only small, but is in a niche of publishing English books where there are mostly only books in German and the local press mostly only reviews German books. That could be a disadvantage but being small and 'different' has always been an advantage for us. We do what we want and have a good time, dare to just try out new ideas. Big publishing houses have specialists (acquisition editors, copy editors, sales teams, designers) who always need new books to justify their existence. We bring out a new book only when we are convinced it has a chance to be a success for a long time. A great deal of loving care goes into getting a book to suit our niche market, into making it as attractive and enjoyable to read as possible. We've been very fortunate in having tremendous authors who also put a lot of their hearts, Z端rich, February 2012 /1