Group CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson says plans afoot for more differentiated commercial fiction
Chennai, February 24:  

Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography Playing it my Way, which sold a record 2.2 lakh copies in India, powered publisher Hachette India to a very good year which saw it grow 27 per cent. Group CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson, who was visiting India, says the book had done well worldwide too and was India’s blockbuster counterpart to the UK’s Alex Ferguson in record-breaking sporting biographies.

   Hachette, he says, came to publish Sachin’s book not because it outbid others but for the fact that the cricketer trusted the publisher with his life story. “We have a very good sports editor in Roddy Bloomfield who is a legend in himself and is deeply connected with the cricket world. He is friendly with Sachin and I think this was discussed for seven or eight years and that’s how good publishing sometimes happens. Sometimes it’s all over the media and there is an auction, we all just pay lots of money. This was a relationship built up over a good number of years,” explains Hutchinson in an interview.

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