Hachette Children's Group MD Ruth Alltimes: 'This is not a time to be fearful, but to feel liberated'
Ruth Alltimes, the newly appointed MD of Hachette Children’s Group, is heading to Bologna feeling energised and hopeful
This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair has landed conveniently for Ruth Alltimes, who took on the mantle of managing director of Hachette Children’s Group (HCG) just one month ago. “It’s really nice timing because it’s giving me the chance to connect and reconnect with a lot of people in my new role.” As she’s so early on in her tenure, Alltimes admits she is still in “listening and learning mode” and focused on facilitating conversations with colleagues from across the business. “I’m really open to and enjoying that process. It’s very energising.”
Alltimes joined HCG in 2016 from HarperCollins Children’s Books. Prior to her promotion, she was group senior trade publisher, working under former CEO Hilary Murray Hill, who has now retired and moved into the position of chair. “It’s such a privilege to be able to step up into a wider remit at a place I already love working at so much,” she says. “I’m really looking forward to working more with the fantastic talent we have and being across the broader picture.” On the latter point, she adds: “As a member of the HCG board, I’ve been working closely with people in other teams, but having an overview and the chance to steer those areas of the business is really exciting. That’s the main difference [from my previous job] – and, I guess, the fact that the buck now stops with me, which is a little bit scary, but also invigorating.”
‘Storytelling is fundamental to the human race. It’s how we communicate, how we understand things. I don’t believe storytelling is going away anytime soon’
Though she admits “I don’t have all those answers yet” when it comes to her priorities for HCG, she tells me: “We have had some of the biggest and best hits in children’s publishing in the past few years, many of those global, from a wide pool of voices, and arguably some of them market leaders. It would be fair to say that I would like us to have more of those, perhaps more consistently. So, I do have big ambition and hope for HCG, and I think we are really well-placed to do that creatively and commercially, in terms of the team in-house and the people we work with.”
Developing readers
While the market is currently very focused on YA – and HCG has been acquiring and publishing more in this area – Alltimes is still prioritising books for a younger audience. “If we aren’t bringing people in and getting them excited at that end, ultimately we won’t have the readers of the future,” she says. The HCG picture-book list is “in an incredibly good place”, she adds, promising to be “very focused on maintaining and growing that success”.
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She is also eyeing the developing-reader space, which she feels is crying out for a fresh approach. “It’s something we’ve been talking about in our creative meetings. It’s an area that’s not so cherished by retail, I would say, at the moment. It isn’t always easy to find that content, and yet it’s such an important part of a child’s reading journey. So if we can’t get that right, that’s a problem. I think we’re probably all thinking about how we can do that a bit differently.”
Meanwhile, Alltimes is “looking at and trying to learn from” children’s media brands that are “doing pure fun really well”, explaining: “Books can bring that emotional learning opportunity, but they can also be about sheer entertainment. Maybe we haven’t been as focused on that in recent years as we could or should have been as an industry.” She teases projects in this vein coming from HCG in the next couple of years.
According to Alltimes, the HCG team is “very vigilant to trends and looking at places outside of books”. She expands: “There’s much more quick publishing now, where something explodes and we can see a book opportunity in it and get something out there quickly. That’s important when we talk about publishing for every reader. Publishing needs to stay relevant, and that’s one of the ways we can engage with, even compete with, all the different things that are vying for children’s time and attention.” She also believes that children’s publishing needs to remain relevant in terms of inclusivity, particularly given the decline in representative children’s books reported by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education last November. “There is still a lot of work to be done on this across the industry, and we’re very aware of that, so it remains something we’re really focused on… If we can’t create content for and tell stories for every possible reader out there, then we’re not doing our jobs. It’s definitely not something we’re pulling away from.”
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Alltimes is anticipating a “very exciting time” in Bologna. Her time there will kick off with an Enid Blyton Entertainment showcase run by HCG’s rights team for international partners. Publishing Blyton remains big business both at home and abroad, particularly in Europe. “It’s been in growth year-on-year, and with the big, star-studded The Magic Faraway Tree film coming, it’s a really crucial time for us in terms of talking about our upcoming, exciting plans.”
HCG intends to build on new Blyton-related publishing, such as Chris Smith’s The New Famous Five books, alongside “reinventing the backlist and keeping it relevant”. Alltimes adds: “It really works well for us, and I think for the readers – that partnering of a fantastic contemporary author talent with Enid Blyton’s beloved characters and brands, so that we continue to bring those to new readers in relevant, fun ways.” Other books the team will champion at the fair include Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon School spin-off series and “personal favourite” A Poem in the Sky, a 2026 picture book in which a poem from the late Benjamin Zephaniah is brought to life by Nila Aye’s illustrations.
New opportunities
Alltimes acknowledges that there are “a lot of challenges” facing the children’s book trade at the moment, including the literacy crisis, the increased cost of living, the changing retail space, competition for children’s attention and issues for colour printing such as pricing and shipping. “We have to tackle those challenges, but a lot of them can be looked at as an opportunity too,” she says. “We can use them to cut ourselves free from some assumptions we’ve been making and look for new and exciting ways to do things: different ways of telling stories, of reaching readers, different models for publishing.”
“One of the reasons I love what I do so much is that I think storytelling is fundamental to the human race. It’s how we communicate, how we understand things. I don’t believe storytelling is going away anytime soon. I feel quite strongly, and quite hopeful, about that.” She continues: “It’s about making sure that publishing can remain at the heart of story-telling. Children’s publishing is so important now, maybe more important than ever. It’s not a time to be fearful. It’s a time to feel liberated by the fact that maybe a lot of the old rules don’t stand anymore.”
