Novel about vampire Edward was shelved for 12 years after online leaks but has become an immediate bestseller – and author ‘wants to write more’
Stephenie Meyer has revealed she has plans for at least two more books in her vampire saga Twilight, as the latest instalment Midnight Sun shot straight to the top of the charts in both the UK and US, where it has sold more than 1m copies in a week.
Midnight Sun, a retelling of Meyer’s first Twilight story that swaps perspectives from the human Bella to her vampiric love interest Edward, has sold more than 1m copies in all formats in the US since it was released on 4 August. Megan Tingley at Meyer’s publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, told USA Today that the figures were “breathtaking”.
Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer review – dusk falls on Twilight saga
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In the UK, 62,460 hardback copies of Midnight Sun were sold in the three days between launch and the cut-off date for sales monitor Nielsen BookScan’s charts, giving Meyer the No 1 spot. However, this was a considerably slower launch than 2010, when Meyer published her Twilight spin-off The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Then, UK readers snapped up 89,549 copies of the novella, which was also available free online at the time, in its first 19 hours on sale – the equivalent of 79 copies a minute.
While enthusiasm among “Twihards” has held, critics have been less impressed. In the Guardian, Elle Hunt wrote, “It feels below the belt to criticise the quality of the writing, given that Twilight was never loved for that – but there is something to be said for editing. Midnight Sun is chronically overwritten, plodding along almost in real time.” The Independent deemed it “laughably bad writing”, while Kirkus called it “a love letter to fans who will forgive (and even revel in) its excesses and indulgences”.
Meyer first announced the publication of Midnight Sun in May, 12 years after she abandoned the manuscript following an online leak of a draft. At the time, Meyer called the leak “a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being” and put the project on hold indefinitely. This August, she told the New York Times that she still wasn’t sure how it happened: “I don’t think there was any bad intent. I think people made copies instead of returning it to me when they had been asked to read it. But that wasn’t as scary. It was when I thought that maybe someone was reading things on my computer that I was more frightened by it.”
In 2013, Meyer said that she would never write another Twilight book, telling Variety that she would only do so if it was “three paragraphs on my blog saying which of the characters died … I get further away [from Twilight] every day. For me, it’s not a happy place to be.” But on Monday, in an online event for US chain Books-A-Million, Meyer said she now has plans for more: “There are two more books I think in the world that I want to write. I have got them outlined and a chapter written I think of the first one, so I know it’s there. I am not ready to do that right now, I want to do something brand new.”
The first four books in the Twilight series, published between 2005 and 2008, have sold more than 100m copies worldwide, with the five-film adaptation taking $3.3bn (£2.6bn).
