Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn sells one million copies in Hardback in the UK

Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight Saga, sold its millionth hardback copy in the UK this week. To date, 85 million copies of the Twilight Saga have been sold.

First published in August 2008, Breaking Dawn is only the eighth book to have sold one million copies in hardback in the UK since TCM began in 2001. It joins JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Delia Smith’s How to Cook, Book1 and Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Ursula Mackenzie, Chief Executive of Little, Brown, comments, “We are delighted that all four titles of a The Twilight Saga have now sold one million copies and, as ever, we are hugely grateful to all of Stephenie Meyer’s loyal fans who have continued to read and enjoy her work.”

The Twilight Saga tells the love story of Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen. In Breaking Dawn, the final novel of the saga, Bella must choose whether to join the dark and seductive immortal world of vampires or to pursue a fully human life.

Breaking Dawn sold 1.3 million copies in its first day on-sale in the United States alone breaking publisher records. Since the publication of Twilight in 2005 the saga has had record breaking sales: all four books have received the Nielsen BookScan Platinum Award for books that have sold a million copies in the UK.

The success of The Twilight Saga continued through 2009 with Breaking Dawn being awarded WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2009. In June it was announced that 10 pence in every pound spent on a children’s book in Britain was on a title in The Twilight Saga and a copy of The Twilight Saga was being sold every two seconds. When New Moon, the second Twilight movie, was released in November 2009 it was reported to have grossed over $475 million worldwide.

2010 sees another exciting publishing schedule for The Twilight Saga. Eclipse, the third of the film adaptations is due for release in July 2010 and to celebrate Little, Brown will publish two new Eclipse film tie-in paperback editions and Eclipse Collector’s Edition in summer 2010.

1 comment:

Vanda Symon said...

Congratulations to Stephanie on her success, which is amazing, but I have to admit to being a little disheartened with it all.

What got to me the most was seeing the lists at the end of the year for the top sellers in New Zealand of books for teens, and Stephanie Meyer's titles filled the spots 1 through to 9, then number 10 was Miley Cyrus.

Sigh.