The Buying Power of Twilight

In the last week we’ve had more stories about how even though we are in economic hard times, Twilight related items are going strong.

  • Bella’s jacket that was re-released, is now on back order due to demand.
  • Hot Topic is going strong because more mainstream teens are visiting their store for Twilight merchandise. (Now if they’d just cut their clothes larger!)
  • The Twilight movie, just opened in Japan and Turkey last weekend has raised its foreign box office to a staggering $188,447,533 foreign total. That’s nearly half of the movie’s total box office income of $191,465,414.

Now this one is really staggering. USA Today doesn’t, like the New York Times or Publishers Weekly, subcategorize the books in its bestseller list. In other words everyone is lumped in together. So, you get a really good picture of overall what is selling and what isn’t.

For a little bit of trivia the NY Times used to do this to with a distinction only for ficition, non-fiction, hardback, and paperback until Harry Potter sat at the top of their list for two years and people complained and now they have at least 20 categories and subcategories. In our opinion, the fact that the NY Times list is now so subdivided is the largest reason why it took the major media so long to catch on to what Twilight was doing.

So, according to USA Today Stephenie Meyer is responsible for 16% of all books sold in the USA in the first quarter this year. Now, if you were to add in The Twilight Companion Movie Guide and the Twilight Director’s Notebook, which obviously Stephenie didn’t write, but without her work would be impossible to have, that number floats even higher.

Here’s where those books ranked:

1. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
2. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
3. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
4. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
14. The Host by Stephenie Meyer

currently 122 The Movie companion
currently 16 The Director’s Notebook

Kristen Stewart Talks About Fan Recepetion

Kristen Stewart talks to USA Today about her movie Adventureland and what it’s been like living under the Twilight microscope this past year:

On her awkwardness in interviews:

Really, I’m incredibly disjointed and not candid,” she says. “Just in general, my thoughts tend to come out in little spurts that don’t necessarily connect. If you hang around long enough, you can find, like, the linear path. But it will take a second. That’s why these interviews never go well for me.”

On fans:

“More than three girls of that certain age — run away,” she says, laughing as the threat settles in a distant part of the patio. “Girls are scary. Large groups of girls scare the (crap) out of me.”

She says Pattinson gets it worse. “They covet him. I think half of them are so jealous that they hate me,” she jokes.