Twilight passes two million mark

28.07.10 | Philip Stone in The Bookseller

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, the first instalment in the US novelist's hugely popular dark romance series of the same name, has become only the 13th novel to sell more than two million copies in the UK since the turn century.

Stephenie Meyer follows in the footsteps of J K Rowling, Dan Brown and Mark Haddon - the only other authors to have achieved the two-million-in-the-21st-century feat.

Last week, the book sold 16,672 copies in the UK, taking its total sales to date to 2,005,609. Just over £9.7m has been spent on the book since it was first published in the UK in 2006 - a year in which it sold just 1,684 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan data.

It wasn't until the Summer of 2008 and the release of the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, that Meyer became a household name in the UK. In 2007, sales of Twilight totalled 27,000 copies, but the following year were a massive 355,000 thanks in part to its silver-screen adaptation hitting UK cinemas in December. Sales last year totalled 1,267,000 copies while the book has sold 355,000 copies thus far in 2010.

Including The Host, and other Twilight titles such as boxed sets, the Twilight Graphic Novel and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, £47.7m has been spent on Stephenie Meyer's books since the beginning of 2006. Last year, one in every 47 books bought in the UK was penned by the US novelist, while almost 20 pence in every pound spent on a children's fiction title went towards one of her Twilight novels.