Podcast
Topics covered
- Migrating to Switzerland
- Getting a job in the publishing industry in Switzerland
- Helvetiq: the only trilingual commercial publisher
- Exploring new places in Switzerland
- Swiss meditation centres and retreats
Who We're Speaking With
In this episode, we welcome author and publisher Richard Harvell.
Richard was born in New Hampshire in the US and now lives in Basel, where he is Head of USA Publishing at Helvetiq and Publisher at Bergli Books. In addition to being a publisher, Richard is a best-selling author in his own right, with work translated into 15+ languages.
About the Episode
If you’re thinking about moving to Switzerland, one of the best ways to prepare is to learn from other people who’ve done the same. Our guest, Richard, has been living in the Basel area since 2003.
Some of the things Richard mentions:
- The Graubünden/Grisons area: This is a canton in the very eastern part of Switzerland. Although there are some tourist resorts, it is sparsely populated and natural — great for solitary hikes.
- Meditation centres: Several centres offer retreats for people who would like to learn more about mediation and Buddhism. The Dhamma Sumeru Vipassana Centre in Mont-Soleil and Tibet Institut in Rikon are two good examples.
- Activities: Richard’s tip for newcomers is to get involved in an activity. This is the best way to learn about the culture, meet new people, and settle in. He got his job and met his wife through basketball.
- Helvetiq: The only trilingual commercial publisher in the world is based in Switzerland. Helvetiq and Bergli Books accept direct submissions. If you have a unique nonfiction book idea, let them know.
Resources
The Dhamma Sumeru Vipassana Centre in Mont-Soleil
Next steps
If you got something out of the podcast then please leave a review on your favourite platform. Thank you for listening.
Check out current job opportunities in Switzerland
Send us a spontaneous application
Sign up for our newsletter and receive our Living in Switzerland Welcome ebook guide.
Transcript
Daniel: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Expert Guide to Your Life in Switzerland. This is a series of conversations in which we speak with experts about different aspects of life in Switzerland and share what we learn with you. This series is brought to you by Rigby. We are a staffing and IT-services company based in Zurich. If you or anyone you know of is looking for a new role in Switzerland, or if you're looking to hire, let us know - we'd be happy to help. The best way to do that is by sending an email to contact@rigby.ch.
Alright, in today's episode, we'll be speaking with Richard Harvell. Richard was born in New Hampshire in the US and now lives in Basel here in Switzerland, where he is Head of USA Publishing at Helvetiq, and Publisher at Bergli Books. In addition to being a publisher, Richard is a best-selling author in his own right, with work translated into 15+ languages. Richard, thank you for joining us.
Richard: Thanks, Daniel. It's great to be here.
Daniel: All right. So, could we begin by speaking a little bit about your background and what brought you to Switzerland?
Richard: So actually, I came over for basketball, which a lot of people are surprised to hear that. When I was still studying in the US, I visited Switzerland really briefly and visited a school up in the mountains called the Ecole d'Humanité on Hasliberg, and I was just there for a few days and then I left and went back to the US. And then I got a call from the school director a few days later, saying that they were desperately searching for a basketball coach and he'd heard that I played basketball. And they were looking for some that come over for a year. They had a number of Chinese students who desperately wanted to play and so I came over to coach basketball and taught some US history. And my wife was, or my future wife was, was a teacher at the school. So, we went back to the US for a few years and then moved to Basel, where she's from, in 2003.
Daniel: Yeah, that's quite a story. So you came over for basketball?
Richard: Yes and actually I recently joined a, three or four years ago, I joined a basketball team here in Basel and played for one year till I dislocated my finger. And that's actually how I got to know my current boss, Hadi Barkat, who's the CEO of Helvetiq. So, basketball basically has given me everything in life. Wife, job!
Daniel: Wow, look at that. And what's the connection to Hadi?
Richard: So Hadi who is the founder and CEO at Helvetiq. He used to live in Boston as well for a few years and was also a Boston Celtics fan. And at some point, we were both living in Basel and found that out, and he said, 'hey, we should play basketball'. We heard there's a team. And we went out and played together for a year until we both hurt ourselves and realised we're too old for basketball, so.
Daniel: You know, that's funny. I've played football maybe once or twice a week since I was about 12 and I didn't find my wife or job through it.
Richard: Well, maybe it's the wrong sport. Maybe it's only works with basketball.
Daniel: But how did you go from teaching basketball to publishing?
Richard: Yeah, so then I was working as a math teacher and as an English teacher in Basel. But I knew that I always wanted to be a writer. And so I've been working on a novel for, for a good decade, a novel about an opera singer in the 18th century. And they managed to sell it through a US agent to a US publisher. And then they, they, they sold it to lots of other foreign publishers to be translated into more than 15 languages. And then I got asked to visit a bookstore in Basel, which was the Bergli bookstore, run by Diane Dicks who also had a small publishing company. And she had me in to talk about my book, had a really nice event there. And then she told me she was retiring, she'd sold the publisher to a larger Swiss publisher. No basketball involved here.
Daniel: Yeah, I was about to ask!
Richard: And she said, 'Do you want to take over?' and I said 'No way, definitely not. I want to be a writer, I don't want to be a publisher.' And she said 'Oh, come on in. Come have a talk with us. We'll have a meeting with the Schwabe Verlagsgruppe, they're the oldest publisher in the world. They have no idea what they want to do with this little English publisher. They'll give you complete freedom to do anything you want'. And I went in and that was basically all true. They're really nice, very generous. Had lots of experience in publishing but wanted to try something new. And I ran the company with them for six years, and then got to know Hadi through basketball. And Helvetiq really is a great fit for Bergli because Helvetiq has always been, has always thought multilingually. Helvetiq does books and games and in lots of different languages and it just seemed like a natural fit. And during the pandemic, we made plans for Helvetiq to buy Bergli from the Schwabe Verlagsgruppe. That was about a year ago,
Daniel: Right, it was in 2021 that Bergli became part of Helvetiq?
Richard: Exactly. 2021, so it's been about a year and a half now.
Daniel: And has your role changed at all with that transition?
Richard: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. In a good way, I'd say. Bergli has has benefited by having access to all of the people who make Helvetiq such a great company. The sales team, the graphic designers, interns who do lots of social-media work. We're really, Bergli is part of a larger team, which means that I have more time to take on some some other tasks. And that has been from the beginning. Hadi knew that he really wanted to make Helvetiq a global publisher. And, in order to do that, we had to, we knew that we had to have an English imprint to publish books, not only Swiss books that we translate in English, but we had to do it right. We had to have a warehouse in the US, we had to make books for the American market. We had to sell them to English speakers, directly, we had we had to compete on an equal footing with English and UK publishers. So, that's what we've done. We've spent the last year making plans to open a US imprint. And we published our first book last month.
Daniel: Right. And something that's interesting about Helvetiq is that it's one of the only, if not the only, trilingual commercial publisher in the world, with the three languages being French, German, and English. Are there any advantages to publishing in English in particular, that you've found?
Richard: Yeah, exactly. So I think that, we're looking for any other trilingual commercial publishers. We haven't found way. If anyone, if any of you are listening out there right now and you know of a trilingual commercial publisher, we'd love to know about that. We know there's lots of publishers that publish books in multiple languages. You know, they they're maybe an academic publisher, and they they do lots of different translations, or the first publisher, and they publish their book in 10 languages. But what Helvetiq does, it really, we choose projects that we really believe in and we think about them from the very beginning, how are we going to do this in French, how are we going to do this in German, how are we going do this in English, all at the same time? So we really can plan that. It's a real advantage to think about that from the beginning. And then the advantage of having a book in English is that not only do you reach the largest book market in the world, which is English speakers, but also, you can then, those books can then be attractive to other publishers, whether they're Polish publishers, or Chinese publishers, or Portuguese publishers, who then read our English versions and decide how we want to publish that in their language, which is what happened to my own novel. That is, I had an American publisher but then they manage the time 15 publishers around the world who wanted to translate it.
Daniel: And Helvetiq accepts direct submissions through its website, which I think is interesting. Are there any particular types of book proposals that you're looking for, that you hope to see?
Richard: Yeah, so exactly. We are, we're a very hands on publisher. A lot of publishers expect an agent to be between the author and the publisher. You can really just email us an idea. And we'll take every idea seriously. Sometimes it takes us a while to get back to you. Sometimes we get back to you very quickly and tell you that 'no, it's not a great fit for us'. But we really do we really do consider everything. We publish mainly what we publish, first of all, only nonfiction. So fiction, whether it's a novel or short stories, is not something we do. We sometimes publish children's fiction, which are real, especially if they're very traditional legends. We just published a book of, a graphic novel about Basel with four legends in it. So, we do a little bit of fiction that way, but generally, our books are all nonfiction books.
They're in the they're either anything from cookbooks to hiking guides. The beer hiking series is the best selling series of hiking guides in the world. So it's really every type of nonfiction book. In the US, we're really focusing on gift books. Books that are beautifully illustrated, books that are beautifully designed, books that are either full of humour or full of information, or that you can give to a friend. Like a book about the Internet that you give to someone, that makes them laugh, and they can leave on the coffee table. So that's really the focus of the English language imprint.
Daniel: So you mentioned hiking. And as part of your research for some of these hiking books, have you had a chance to travel around Switzerland a bit?
Richard: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I'm always so amazed by our authors. So our authors do things like hike 60,000 vertical meters in two months and drink all the beer at all of the breweries at the tops of those mountains. Or even crazier. So I'm very lucky that I get to, I get to hike once in a while. I've been to, one of the things that was really nice about doing the, the Alpine Survival Guide, the one on the glaciers, was that I got to go to these glaciers, so especially up in Saas-Fee. The last chapter is all about how glaciers are melting and what that means for the future of Switzerland. And so I spent a week in Saas-Fee with a scientist who was very generously gave us a week of his time. I visited the top of the glaciers and then got to go underneath the glaciers into these, these underground, into these ice caves underneath the glacier. So I feel like I get to do some of the cool things but not nearly as cool as our authors.
Daniel: Do you have any favourite hikes or areas of Switzerland that you've visited?
Richard: Oh, absolutely. Definitely. So if I had to choose a favourite area, it would be Hasliberg, which is, that's where the Ecole d'Humanité was, where I taught basketball for a year. It's just, it's amazing, you have beautiful views of the Eiger and it's just absolutely spectacular. But I've also fallen in love with Saas-Fee. I just think Saas-Fee is amazing. And then for day hikes in the Basel region, which is full of amazing hikes. There's an amazing hike from Zwingen to Nenzlingen. It's just a few hours, but you go past these amazing old castles and past this beautiful nature reserve and just something like that just amazes me, especially coming from Boston or coming from the US, where you don't have medieval castles. And that's just like a small hike in your backyard.
Daniel: We touched on this a bit earlier, but what does Helvetiq have coming up in the US imprint?
Richard: Yeah, so we, our first two books we just launched last month in the US. One of them was already a bestseller in Europe. That's the one about the internet, it's called Welcome to the Internet. And it's 50 postcards, beautifully illustrated postcards, all about the story of the internet.
Another one is called I am Snow. And it's the story of snow from a snowflake's perspective, like 'I'm snow, I was born up here in the sky and came down and landed on your tongue and then melted away' and it, it talks about the snow, and it talks about the science of snow. We had one really nice review of it recently, from the Natural History Museum of New York, they chose it as a best book of the season. So, we're really proud of that. So those are the first two books out in the US. And then we have a few more next year, including a book about the history of Christmas.
Daniel: If someone's thinking about moving to Switzerland and they want to learn a bit more about Swiss life and culture before they arrive, do you have any book recommendations?
Richard: Absolutely. I mean, I guess I'm biased because it's what I do for a living, but I would say that Bergli is really the place to come. I feel like Bergli is a company with a mission, which is to, it's all about bridging cultures. It's all about helping foreigners who come to Switzerland to understand this strange place and all about helping locals to understand what foreigners are going through. And so you can really see that through the last, you know, 35 years of publishing. We've done books like, like Swiss Watching, which has just sold more than a hundred thousand copies and is in its fifth edition. Living and Working in Switzerland, another classic book for, for those who are really looking to settle here. So I would just say just go to, go to Bergli.ch. We have an English, French and German version of the website and you'll find all the books there.
Daniel: Thank you. And as we wrap up here, is there anything you'd like to say to the audience or promote?
Richard: Yeah, I would just say if, if any of you out there have an idea for a book, you know, feel free to email us. We'd love to hear your idea. And I'd also just say, I think it's amazing, Daniel, what you guys are doing here. I think that Rigby is so generous in doing something that isn't just about business but also just to help people in the community. So thank you for doing that.
Daniel: Richard, thank you for joining us, and thank you everyone for listening. If you're enjoying this series, do give us a like or a rating wherever you're listening. That helps us know that you're enjoying it and that we should continue. And if you know someone who is looking for a role in Switzerland, or if you're hiring, please send us an email at contact@rigby.ch. We'd be happy to help. That's all from us. Goodbye.