I was absolutely amazed when I stumbled onto a list of the bestselling books in America a few weeks ago and discovered that one author occupied the top four spots. I am guessing that this has never happened previously in United States book history, or at least not in a long, long time.
Image from StephenieMeyer.comI’m guessing that these books sold nearly four million copies combined in the month of December. That is a stunning number when you consider that in a typical week a book only has to sell about 4,000 copies to make The New York Times bestseller list.
Even more remarkable, I had never even heard of the author: Stephenie Meyer. Her books are vampire books aimed at teenagers.
I suppose it says something about me that when my laptop went dead just before a four-hour flight home, I couldn’t find a single book I wanted to buy in the airport bookstore — until I saw Twilight, the first in the series of Stephenie Meyer books. A vampire book aimed at teenagers is probably just about my speed.
Although I will say I was somewhat disappointed with the book, an outside observer would laugh at that description, given that I read it in less than a week. My kids would remind me that I told them they would have to make their own dinner because I had to finish the book to find out whether Bella would turn into a vampire or not. I guess the fact that I ordered the other three books in the series from Amazon also gives me away.
I’m not sure what I expected, but I found the book to be juvenile in a way that Harry Potter wasn’t. The seductive thing about the book is the way that Meyer creates an alternative vampire universe that is embedded into our own world, where the reader ends up liking the vampires more than the people. That, I think, was the secret to the Harry Potter books as well. Somehow both Meyer and J.K. Rowling manage to create a fantasy world that is absurd, and yet somehow vaguely believable.
Now we just need to figure out how to work some vampires into SuperFreakonomics to boost our sales.
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The economics angle is this:
How would your decisions be affected if you no longer had to pay for food? If you were comfortable with extremes of temperatures enough that heating and aircon were seldom an issue? What about the millions we spend on coping with age?
You say this has never happened in book history, and that maybe technically true, but it’s only because the Best Sellers list cheats. They changed the rules in 2000 to keep Harry Potter from taking up so much room, creating a separate children’s list and banning J.K.R. from the regular fiction lists.
It would not surprise me if they start to get upset at Twilight too and relegate those books to a separate “Young Adults” list or something.
The books are juvenile, but that was, I suspect, done on purpose. If anything, Meyer knows her actual target audience quite well. I also suspect that the fiction market for award winning economists is quite small compared to the scores of teenagers.
The vampire series from Anne Rice did much the same thing you describe regarding bringing the vampires into our world in a sympathetic way. But her books were definitely much more at an adult level.
Though reading Meyers books is the intellectual equivalent of eating a candy bar, I’m glad you enjoyed Twilight too. Your coolness factor just went up a few pegs more for admitting it.
As far as I can tell, having read about 50 pages of the first book and then giving it to the local library, the Twilight series is basically “Sweet Valley High” with vampires.
Even R.L. Stine wasn’t as bad as this tripe.
Looks like the NY Times will have to tweak its Best Seller List criteria again in order to give these Twilight books the boot just like it did with the Harry Potter series by creating a separate children’s list. The series is basically half a thrust short of a Romance novel so it wouldn’t take much to push it over into that bin.
I’m continually offended by people that compare Twilight to Harry Potter. I understand the attraction of the comparison since both series erupted from no where and suddenly became wildly popular, but aside from the simple literary trick of world immersion, the two titles are worlds and worlds apart. Rowling is actually a good storyteller (up until book five or so). Meyer made vampires sparkle.