sales | Twilight Lexicon

Breaking Dawn Exploding Tickets Sales Like No Other Twilight Film

October 25, 2012

According to Deadline:

The final installment of the 5-film Twilight Saga just came on tracking today. And my sources say Breaking Dawn Part 2 which opens November 16th is comping at Part 1‘s record-breaking levels. Plus advance ticket sales are running 16% ahead as well. Summit Entertainment like most studios uses several tracking services, and I’ve learned that Part 2‘s unaided is equal or ahead ofPart 1 – so that make it higher than any of the other Twilight pics. Awareness also is the highest and, in fact, already in the 90s for females. Not only is Breaking Dawn Part 2 tracking better than any other film in already or about to open in the domestic box office before mid-November but it’s even better than James Bond – 72 awareness for Skyfall vs 88 for Breaking Dawn Part 2.

After giving some more data, Deadline concludes its report saying: “Within only a few days of advance tickets going on sale October 1st, Breaking Dawn, Part 2 already represented half of Fandango’s sales for the week. Now Fandango tells me it’s 36% of today’s overall ticket sales even though it doesn’t open for 3 weeks yet outselling this weekend’s Argo, Cloud Atlas, and Silent Hill: Revelation combined.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: boxoffice, Breaking Dawn 2 sales, sales

Harry Potter Finale May Take New Moon and Eclipse Records

July 12, 2011

According to Entertainment Weekly, Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows may overtake he box office records set by New Moon:

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows–Part 2 has already collected $25 million domestically from advance ticket sales, according to Variety. The majority of the sales have reportedly been for midnight screenings, giving Deathly Hallows a legitimate shot at beating the $30 million midnight record set last year by The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. The final Harry Potter film will also be aiming its wand at some other box-office milestones, such as the largest opening day (currently The Twilight Saga: New Moon with $72.7 million) and the biggest opening weekend (The Dark Knight with $158.4 million).”

See more on EW

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Eclipse Movie, Harry Potter, New Moon Movie, sales

The Official Illustrated Guide Debuts At Number 4 on USA Today List

April 21, 2011

USA Today is out with their edition of the top 150 books in the USA this week and here is what they had to say about the Official Illustrated Guide:

“Twilight fever: Proving that Twilight fans never say die, Stephenie Meyer returns to the top 10 this week with a new book. The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide, a companion to the series and blockbuster movies, enters USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list at No. 4. In March, Meyer told USA TODAY: “My favorite part of the guide is the vampire histories,” and she writes in the guide about Edward (played by Robert Pattinson): “Unfortunately Edward isn’t based on anybody — he is all imagination and wishing. I think his allure is partially due to his old-fashioned manners. He’s a gentleman, and those are hard to come by these days.”

The USA Today list is a really unique one on several levels. Their list is very inclusive, for example they allow YA and children’s books on their list where others like The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly don’t. Unlike the New York Times, they don’t divide their list into sub-categories. Everything from cookbooks, to self-help guides, to novels land on the very same list. So, you get a really interesting perspective on what America is reading overall, not just category by category. As a side note, IT’S HUGE that a novel like Water For Elephants that has been out for awhile and is now in paperback is on the list in the number 1 position BEFORE the movie comes out. This should be a good sign for opening weekend box office.

You can check out the whole list here.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Official Twilight Illustrated Guide, sales, USA Today

The Twilight Saga Official Illustrated Guide and Hits Top Indie Book List

April 19, 2011

According to the publishing industry website Galleycat, The Twilight Saga Official Illustrated Guide made its debut in the Indiebound list’s number 4 spot.

“We’ve collected the hardcover books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending April 17, 2011–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #4) The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guideby Stephenie Meyer: “This comprehensive handbook-essential for every Twilight Saga fan-is full-color throughout with nearly 100 gorgeous illustrations and photographs and with exclusive new material, character profiles, genealogical charts, maps, extensive cross-references, and much more.” (April 2011)”

The Indiebound list covers items purchased at independent bookstore like King’s English in Utah, Changing Hands in Arizona, or Books of Wonder in New York. Chain book stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders see their purchases reflected in places like the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and New York Times book lists. Certain indie book stores also have their sales count on those big name lists as well. The larger book lists results usually have a two week lag, so the guide will probably not be on any of them this Friday.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Official Twilight Illustrated Guide, sales

Bree Tanner Does Well in Year End Aussie Sales

January 11, 2011

According to the Sydney Morning Herald

“Stephenie Meyer’s The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (186,000) was officially third, with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love coming in fifth. Julie Goodwin’s Our Family Table was the best-performing book by an Australian writer, selling 150,000 copies. The winner of the first MasterChef outsold the series’ second cookbook by 84,000.

According to Shaun Symonds, general manager of Nielsen BookScan Australia, 66.2 million books were sold in 2010, a slight increase on 2009. He said value was down 4.2 per cent at $1.26 billion. ”There were no real blockbusters last year; no Stephenie Meyer[Lexicon Note: We assume they mean novel and not novella], Dan Brown or Matthew Reilly. And if you take away the Meyer sales from the previous year, sales value dropped only 0.8 per cent. And retail trade was generally down.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Bree Tanner, sales

Twight Saga Books Take 3 Out of 5 Top Seller Positions in Scotland

December 31, 2010

According to the Daily Record, Twilight Saga books continued to be strong sellers in Scotland this year.

“The Oor Wullie Book: 2011 topped the chart ahead of Meyer’s The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner.

The Guinness World Records 2011 was third while two other books from Meyer’s worldwide hit Twilight vampire series, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, were fourth and fifth.”

Oor Willie is a Scottish comic strip that has been around for over 70 years. The Oor Willie book is a compilation of comic strips.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: sales, Twilight Saga

Twilight Sales Reached Saturation Point?

October 20, 2010

The Daemon’s book blog has noted that Twilight sales have fallen off:

“For the first time in over three years, none of the books in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga are on USA Today’s top 50 Best-Selling Books list. At least one or more of the four books had been on the list since July 12, 2007 (170 consecutive weeks).

Breaking Dawn fell from the top 50 to number 54, Twilight is at 172, New Moon is number 238, and Eclipse is 198.

Meyer’s publicist tells USA Today that they expect to see a spike in book sales when the Breaking Dawn movie hit theaters in December[Lexicon note: article error on the author’s part, possibly they meant the Eclipse DVD]. Plus, Meyer is releasing The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide in April, and that is sure to put her back on the bestseller list.

The Novel Twilight Reaches a UK Sales Record

July 28, 2010

According to the Book Seller Blog:

“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.”

For those of you who didn’t discover Twilight until more recently, Twilight struggled to find an audience in the UK if for no other reason the UK distributor saddled it with a now replaced terrible cover and then came up with an arguably even more dreadful cover for New Moon (seen above). At the time, it was our perception that they seemed hell bent on marketing it as dark vampire lit. As the article states, the book took off once it gained fame in the US, was repackaged in the US format after Eclipse, and not marketed as a dark, gothic, tale.

Incidentally, if you have the book with one of those covers and it’s in good shape, it stand potential as a collectors item particularly if you can get a Stephenie Meyer signature in it.

See more on the Book Seller

Filed Under: News Tagged With: sales, Twilight

The Buying Power of Twilight

April 10, 2009

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

Filed Under: News Tagged With: sales, Stephenie Meyer, USA Today

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