Still 'My Time' for Bradley as book sales continue with no sign of slowing down

Cycling knight Sir Bradley Wiggins is continuing to provide the sports book market with a shot in the arm, even in the traditionally quiet period at the start of a new year.

The Wiggins autobiography, My Time, published by Yellow Jersey, was last year's Christmas hit by a massive margin, the fastest sports biography to clock up 200,000 sales since David Beckham's My Side in 2003.

But where other books that caught the reading public's imagination in the run-up to Christmas have tailed off a little, sales of the Wiggins story have kept on growing.

Nielsen BookScan had recorded almost 229,000 copies of My Time sold by the end of 2012 and another 11,000 have been added in the first month of 2013.  With renewed interest in Wiggins' two previous autobiographies, the Tour de France winner and Olympic gold medallist has sold 278,000 books since the close of London 2012.

This compares with a modest post-Christmas increase from 63,000 copies sold to 67,000 for Jessica Ennis's post-Olympic memoir Unbelievable: and an extra 2,000 copies for Victoria Pendleton's Between the Lines.

An analysis by The Times newspaper suggests Wiggins could earn £1.2 million on the back of his success, although that figure is dwarfed by the potential earnings Ennis can anticipate.

The heptathlete has been described as a 'sponsor's dream', combining good looks with a charming personality.  She has signed contracts with adidas and Pruhealth reportedly worth £450,000 a year and further deals could net her as much as £3.5 million, according to The Times.

Distance runner Mo Farah has endorsement deals with Virgin Media worth £500,000 and with Nike worth £430,000, which the analysis reckons will add up to £3 million earnings directly attributable to his two Olympic golds.

However, a Farah life story has been put on hold for the moment, although his representatives have denied a story that they were unimpressed with the size of advances offered.  They say they want it to be well researched and well written and that it will be released later this year, or in 2014.


My Time: An Autobiography , by Bradley Wiggins
Unbelievable: From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold, by Jessica Ennis
Between the Lines: My Autobiography, by Victoria Pendelton

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The Wiggins effect - Bradley's the new Beckham as My Time flies off the shelves

Tour de France winner, Olympic time-trial champion, BBC Sports Personality of the Year -- not to mention the small matter of a knighthood -- Bradley Wiggins swept all before him in 2012.

It might not come as a major surprise, therefore, that the Wiggins autobiography, My Time, blew the opposition completely off the track in book sales for 2012.

Published by Random House under the Yellow Jersey imprint, My Time did not appear in the bookstores until November 8 yet end-of-year sales figures compiled by Nielsen BookScan were almost 230,000, most of those rung up in the six weeks or so leading up to Christmas.

To put that number in perspective, My Time's sales accounted for almost a quarter of sales for the whole sports autobiography sector in 2012.  Indeed, if the resurgence in sales enjoyed by the earlier Wiggins life story, In Pursuit of Glory, is taken into account, Britain's all-time greatest cyclist cornered more than a quarter of that market.

According to Nielsen, only five sports autobiographies have sold more copies all told than My Time since they began collating statistics from book retailers in 1988.  That list is headed with more than half a million copies sold by the David Beckham autobiography My Side, which stormed the Christmas market in 2003.

My Side is the only title to have passed the 200,000 mark faster than My Time, which is another indication of the impact Wiggins has made with the British public.

Some critics have argued that My Time lacks depth and emotion compared with In Pursuit of Glory but speed of production was always going to be a critical issue as publishers sought to ride the Olympic wave and William Fotheringham, the cycling journalist and author who helped Wiggins turn his reflections into words on a page, should be applauded for meeting what must have been a daunting deadline.

The same can be said of Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer entrusted with ghosting the Jessica Ennis autobiography, which also took advantage of the book-buying public's appetite for reliving the highs of London 2012.

Unbelievable, released by Hodder and Stoughton on the same day as the Wiggins memoir and Seb Coe's autobiograpphy, also from Hodder, overtook Tom Daley's My Story as the second most popular sports biography but the golden girl of the heptathlon still did not come close to Wiggins, with almost four copies of My Time sold for every one of the Ennis tale.

Coe's book, Running My Life, nudged ahead of William Hill Sports Book of the Year winner The Secret Race as the fourth biggest seller of 2012 in the biography section.  Indeed, with In Pursuit of Glory's figures placing it 10th on the list and Victoria Pendleton's Between the Lines in seventh, six of the top 10 had an Olympic theme.

My Time: An Autobiography, by Bradley Wiggins
Unbelievable: From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold, by Jessica Ennis
My Story, by Tom Daley
Running My Life - The Autobiography, by Seb Coe
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle
Between the Lines: My Autobiography, by Victoria Pendleton
In Pursuit of Glory: The Autobiography, by Bradley Wiggins

Click on the links for more information or to buy.

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Jessica Ennis adds final chapter to a golden year with story of how she fulfilled her Olympic dreams

COMING SOON: Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold

The autobiography of Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis

It is a measure of the essential modesty of Olympic golden girl Jessica Ennis that she was reluctant to commit to telling her life story before London 2012 because she was not sure that she had done enough to warrant it.

The idea was discussed earlier this year, when she asked Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer who had ghosted her column in The Times since 2009, if he would be willing to work with her, only to decide that she did not want to blur her focus on her ultimate goal.

"We talked about it but she was always in two minds," Broadbent told The Sports Bookshelf. "She didn't want to do it because, in her mind, she had not really achieved anything, so the project was put on hold."

Ennis had been European and World heptathlon champion but only Olympic gold would satisfy her definition of achievement and it was not until the medal was hers on that memorable August night in east London that she felt she had a story to share. The rights to her autobiography were not assigned to publishers Hodder and Stoughton until the first week in September.

It gave Broadbent a testing schedule to deliver the manuscript on time but having written a number of books in his own name and ghosted others, he had some experience to draw on.  He had the benefit, too, of a well-established working relationship with his subject. The book will be published on November 8.

"It helped that I've known Jessica for some years so a lot of the background was familiar to me already," he said. "I first met her in 2008 and we have worked together on her column in The Times since 2009.

"And I like her as a person. She is genuinely lovely and a pleasure to deal with, and that isn't something you can always say about people involved in professional sport at the highest level.  She is the nicest person I've met in my career in journalism."

"She had never cried on the podium before."

Ennis has a personality that exudes warmth and her place in the affections of the British public was only reinforced when, in her trackside interview with the BBC's Phil Jones in the aftermath of her Olympic victory, she struggled in vain to hold her emotions in check.  Tearful scenes at the moment of triumph or defeat have become commonplace but for Ennis, a proud Yorkshire girl with some Sheffield steel beneath the soft exterior, it was a first.

"She had never cried on the podium before," Broadbent said. "It was a first show of emotion in public.  She had always managed to hold it in before, even at the lowest moments.

"She has been through the mill with injuries, missing the Beijing Olympics of course.  So after winning in London I think it was just a total outpouring of relief.  She knew it was her one chance really to be Olympic champion and she had done it."

Broadbent first encountered Ennis at Gotzis in Austria in 2008, when he was among the journalists who interviewed her as she lay on a couch, her foot encased in ice after the fateful injury to her right ankle had forced her to withdraw from competition only 10 weeks ahead of the Beijing games.

"It was typical of her that she insisted she would be okay, that it was only a precaution.  Of course when she got home the scans revealed the triple fracture and her Olympic dream was over."

It would not be the first time she would put on a brave face while inside wanting to cry.  Her book will reveal, however, that away from the public gaze Ennis can be as emotional as any young athlete.

"Behind the scenes there have been tears left, right and centre at times," Broadbent said. "It is not a misery memoir by any means but there bits that the public don't see.

"She has what you might call a love-hate relationship with her coach, Toni Minichiello, that can get a bit feisty.  They can go at each other pretty hard.  She has been with him since she was 13 and I think she feels he treats her sometimes as if she were still 13.

"There have been moments, too, when she has been deeply worried about her health.  She had a time when she was suffering from serious bouts of dizziness, so bad that she could hardly stand, and she had to undergo a brain scan.  It turned out that it was an inner ear problem but she found it pretty scary at the time."

The story reveals, too, that Ennis has a strong sense of what she feels is right for her and that she will not be pushed around.

"This was her one last shot."

"She came under a lot of pressure to move to London at one stage," Broadbent said. "Charles van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics, wanted all the elite athletes and coaches to be based at the Lee Valley Performance Centre in London, and tried to engineer things so that Toni would have to operate from there.

"But Jessica's life was in Sheffield.  She is very close to her family and has a long-term boyfriend and simply refused to move.  It was having that strong connection with her roots that probably kept her grounded and she felt it was important to have a normal life in Sheffield to go back to, away from the limelight."

Broadbent revealed that Ennis speaks out from personal conviction on the subject of body image and eating disorders, prompted by the remarks attributed to an unnamed Great Britain official during the build-up to London 2012 that the 5ft 4ins athlete, renowned for her six-pack, was overweight.

"She was really worried about the message comments like that put out, particularly to young female athletes and girls in general," he said. "She has strong views on body image and eating disorders and drugs as well and she puts them across very well."

There is much in the story about her upbringing in Sheffield as the daughter of a painter and decorator originally from Jamaica and a social worker from Derbyshire who now works for a charity helping people with drug and drink addiction, but also about balancing the commercial opportunities opened to her by fame with the need to keep her eyes on the goal of winning.  Her endorsement contracts only reinforced her status as the poster girl for London 2012, adding to the pressure on her to deliver on the day.

"Don't get me wrong, she likes the profile she has," Broadbent said. "But the build-up to the Games became incredibly stressful for her.  People were expecting her to win but she knows what can go wrong in competition. She also knows she might not get to the next Games in Rio so this was her one shot, her one opportunity to achieve what she had worked for.

"One of the interesting things was that she never wanted to go to the stadium beforehand.  She had never competed in London before the Olympics, not even at Crystal Palace, and she wanted it to be new and exciting."

Ennis has subsequently said that when she stepped into the stadium for the first time ahead of the 100m hurdles event that began the heptathlon programme and was hit by the noise generated by 80,000 spectators in response to her name being called -- a far cry from the half-empty stadiums that often witness the first event in the seven-part programme -- it did give her a significant lift.  Clearly the strategy was the right one.

Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold is published by Hodder and Stoughton on November 8.

Rick Broadbent is the author of several critically acclaimed books, on football, boxing and motorsport.
His Ring of Fire: The Inside Story of Valentino Rossi and MotoGP was shortlisted for the 2009 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

That followed Looking For Eric: In Search of The Leeds Greats and The Big If: The Life and Death of Johnny Owen .

He returned to motorsport this year with That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World, which focuses on the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races through the story of four leading riders.

He also collaborated with paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson and motorcycle racer Ron Haslam on their autobiographies.

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