Stephenie Meyer has revealed that she has plans for at least two more books in her vampire saga Twilight, as the latest installment Midnight Sun shot straight to the top of the charts in both the UK and US, where it more than 1m specimens in a week.
Midnight Sun, a remake of Meyer’s first Twilight story that shifts perspectives from the human Bella to her vampire love interest Edward, has sold more than 1m copies in all formats in the US since it was released on August 4th. Megan Tingley at Meyer Little’s publisher, Brown Books for Young Readers, told USA Today that the figures were “breathtaking”.
In the UK, 62,460 Midnight Sun hardback copies 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 significantly slower launch than in 2010, when Meyer released her Twilight spin-off The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Then, UK readers bought 89,549 copies of the novella, which was also available for free online at the time, for sale in the first 19 hours – the equivalent of 79 copies per minute.
While enthusiasm among ‘Twihards’ has held, critics have been less impressed. In the Guardian, Elle Hunt wrote: ‘It feels out of place to criticize the quality of writing, given that Twilight never loved it – but there is something to be said for editing. Midnight Sun is chronically overwritten, plumping almost in real time. “They Independently considered it “Laughing bad writing”, while Kirkus called it “a love letter to fans who will forgive (and even amaze) his excesses and pleasures”.
Meyer first announced the publication of Midnight Sun in May, 12 years after she left the manuscript following an online leak of a draft. At the time, Meyer called the leak “an enormous 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 she was not yet sure how it happened: ‘I do not think there was any bad intention. I think people made copies instead of giving it back to me when they were asked to read it. But that was not so scary. It was when I thought maybe reading things on my computer that I became more afraid of it. ‘
In 2013, Meyer said she would never write another Twilight book, and told Variety that she would only do so if it was “three paragraphs on my blog that said which of the characters died … I’m going to move on. [from Twilight] every day. For me, it is not a happy place to be. But on Monday, at an online event for the American chain Books-A-Million, Meyer said she now has plans for more: ‘There are two more books I think in the world I want to write . I have sketched them and written a chapter I think of the first, that I know it is there. I’m not ready to do that right now, I want to do something new. ”
The first four books in the Twilight series, published between 2005 and 2008, have sold more than 100m copies worldwide, with the adaptation of five films $ 3.3 billion (£ 2.6 billion).
