If you have just come out of a 3 year hibernation, then you must have missed Stephanie Meyers' great rise to fame now that her 4th and last book "Breaking Dawn" has been released
So who is Stephanie Meyer?
Before becoming a best-selling author, Stephanie Meyer was an ordinary home-maker, a native of Arizona. She attends Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means she is Mormon and that there are no erotic scenes on her book.
She first released Twilight in 2005. It made the rounds on New York Time, Publishers Weekly, Amazon and Teen People. So even then it was acknowledged that she had the potential to even sell more books. An even more unexpected turn-out came when the sequel New Moon was released, and it was a hit ever since.
They're even making a movie! It's like every author's dream come true. Publication, a feature length film and one best-seller after another. Stephanie Meyer is now a household name. I should know, I'm a thousand or so miles away from the Unites States and I know who she is!
My friends have pre-booked their copies of Breaking Dawn weeks ago and we've been reading about her phenomenal successs day-in and day-out. Makes me wish I were a stronger writer.
How did Stephanie Meyer, virtually an unknown author 3 years ago become such a phenomenal best-selling author?
I had to do the research of how she did it. And I have to admit it sure didn't sound like it was easy. Stephanie Meyer started with a dream. Like all authors - she had "THE" dream. The dream that started her story - the dream that started "Twilight."
But not until she took the pain-staking effort to put everything together did she ever come up with a 500-page masterpiece. Sleepless nights with 3 bounding boys, she had to make time to write her chapters. She let her sister, Emily, read through chapter by chapter as she finished them. And Emily told her to get published.
Even Stephanie Meyer had a hard time getting published. She sent out about 15 queries to publishing houses and literary agents and Stephanie Meyer got 8 rejections - let me spell that out, Twilight got EIGHT REJECTIONS when Stephanie tried to get it published.
Now isn't that just a big relief? Knowing that even literary agents can be wrong.
But Stephanie pulled through when a girl from Writer's House came back to her and asked to read the first 3 chapters. The feedback was good and she was approached by Jodi Reamer who became her literary agent. They worked on the manuscript before sending it out to publishing houses, which by the way went out to 9 - yes NINE publishing houses before it even got any attention.
They had to polish it even more and rename the title (from Forks to Twilight) and eventually got the deal of a life time from Little, Brown and Company. According to Stephanie, the deal was so big she thought it was a hoax, and I do believe the deal is just going to get better.
Stephanie Meyer will release another book soon, still in the realm of Twilight but this time from the male protagonist's perspective - Edward, instead of the one from Bella - which is the topic of the Twilight series.
So just to put it all together, it took Stephanie Meyer approximately 2 years to write Twilight and get it published. It took a whole lot of determination and hard work, some guts and support from family and friends to bring the story of Bella and Edward into the millions of young adults all over the world.
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