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The impact of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series on the book industry is showing itself to be amazingly large. Her books took 4 of the 5 top spots on the USA Today’s list of Best-Selling Books for both 2008 and 2009, something no one, not even J.K.Rowling, has ever done before. And with Twilight comes coattails! There are now 16 other vampire titles on this year’s 100 most popular books list, vampire-based TV shows, movies, and more.
USA Today, reporting on trends in 2009:
We have Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampires to thank, in part, for the fact that at least 17% of all book sales tracked in 2009 were related to vampires (and assorted other undead creatures, including zombies) or the paranormal (including paranormal romances). That was up from 14% in 2008, which in turn was way up from 2% in 2007. Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are the inspiration for HBO’s True Blood, had nine titles in the top 100 sellers of the year, and P.C. and Kristin Cast, the mother/daughter team who write the House of Night series, had six. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith is No. 48 on the list. Expect that trend to continue in 2010, again thanks in part to Meyer. She may not have a new book coming out (that we know of so far), but Eclipse, the movie based on the third book in the Twilight series, swoops into theaters in June, and the paperback reissue of her 2008 adult hardcover The Host is out April 13.
But making vampires popular in the general culture is not the only effect. The Twilight Saga has changed how people look at Teen books as a category. Quoting from another USA Today article, Michael Norris, books analyst for Simba Information, a market-research firm say Meyer’s books have turned “the YA (young adult) category into the PG-13 of books,” he says. “She’s not just read by tweens and teens, but by a lot of 30-year-old women.”
No matter who’s reading them, books for kids and teens accounted for 29% of sales tracked in 2009 — the highest percentage in the list’s history, up from 28% in 2008 and 22% in 2007.
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