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