The Sports Bookshelf

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 Jessic

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 N

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 i