Despite the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, new books keep debuting with blockbuster first-week sales numbers. This week’s champion is Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, which publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers said sold more than 1 million copies across all formats last week following its August 4 release. The total includes, LBYR said, “sales of print books, e-books, and audiobooks, as well as additional incoming orders from consumers.”
LBYR added that with demand high, it “has multiple reprints in the works from multiple printers.” Previously, Michael Pietsch, CEO of LBYR parent company Hachette Book Group, said preorders for Midnight Sun were the highest of any book in HBG’s history.
Publication plans for Midnight Sun were announced in early May, with a first announced printing of 750,000 copies. The book retells Meyer’s franchise-launching book, Twilight, from Edward Cullen’s point of view. Her Twilight Saga, comprised of four core novels and three companion volumes, has sold nearly 160 million copies worldwide.
Midnight Sun originally had been set to be released about 12 years ago, but after a partial rough draft of the book was leaked and circulated online, Meyer indefinitely delayed the project. Now, with interest in Twilight still high, Meyer said at an online event for Books-A-Million that more books in the series could be coming, but didn’t commit to timing.
“There are two more books, I think, in the world that I want to write,” she was quoted as saying in The Guardian. “I have got them outlined and a chapter written, I think, of the first one, so I know it’s there. I am not ready to do that right now, I want to do something brand new.” A spokesperson for LBYR said there was nothing official to announce.
The huge first-week demand for Midnight Sun follows strong sales for Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, which Simon & Schuster said sold 1.3 million copies in its first week on sale across all formats, and John Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened, also pubbed by S&S, which had first week sales of 750,000 copies, according to the publisher.
