The Twilight Hysteria! Breaking Dawn In Stores Today! How Did This Housewife From Arizona Do It? How Did Stephanie Meyer Get Published?

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.

Conventional Publishing Challenged - The Tucker Max Dare

I found an article on Comment Is free entitled "Publisher Brought to Book: Unadventurous publishers and booksellers are facing a challenge from new writers who find an audience on the internet." This article basically outlines how Tucker Max, a writer originally rejected by many publishing houses he tried to contact because his book was not saleable. He went online to self-publish 2 books through online publishing houses - Lulu.com & iUniverse.com.

He authored a new type of book that has begun to challenge the publishers and bookstores that leave small independent authors without a voice.

Tucker Max was a "belligerent and debauched" ex-law student who started by establishing a following on the internet and eventually joined the New York Times bestseller list with his book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

According to sources, the publishers' real problem was they had no idea how to market the book.
This, Max realised, is where conventional marketing techniques have failed to capitalise - not only on his own work but on internet literature in general. What the publishing houses had not fully realised was that Max's site had a monthly hit-rate of more than two million unique visits, and a fan base that was actively teeming with support on the website's message board. After months of constant rejections, the book was finally picked up by Kensington Books, the last independent publishing house in the US. His idiosyncratic self-belief eventually paid off in 2006. The UK edition has since been picked up by Penguin, and he has reportedly been offered a $300,000 advance on his next book.

Because of the subject matter, the book's scope for literary acclaim is limited, but the wonder is that it has seen the shelves at all, and it is the power of the internet that has given Max and authors like him a voice.

Max's success did not go unnoticed in the publishing industry, and a number of other writers have since landed book deals on the strength of their online following. Their subjects are various, but New York Times bestseller successes have been enjoyed by books spun off from websites such as Thebestpageintheuniverse.net, a long-running catalogue of satire, criticism and vitriol that has become one of the most popular non-commercial sites on the web. The subversive cartoon site ColoringBookLand.com and satirical news site Thephatphree.com are other such examples. In the UK, the most recognised of these is probably the anyonymous blogger Belle De Jour, who is also a best-selling author and subject of ITV2's new flagship drama The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

The sites and their cross-over books have attracted reverence and revilement in equal degree, and because of their content, they are always likely to be sniffed at by literary critics. Regardless of merit, though, their niche appeal poses a unique challenge to the publishing and bookselling industry.

With the conventional bounds imposed by marketing strategies removed, authors can write about what interests them, no matter how niche it seems. Publishers have the choice to publish, regardless of whether it seems saleable (because an unvisited site is much less of a financial headache than a warehouse full of unsold books). Ultimately, readers have the choice of what to read, far more so than they do in conventional bookshops, where deals have been struck to ensure that big books make big profits, while the weak - meaning the original, the untested - fall by the wayside.

This is by no means the end of the predictable McNovels that dominate our bookstores, but with online publishing opportunities increasing, and online booksellers like Amazon, (whose stock is dictated by demand,) becoming ever more dominant, bookstores might finally have cause to rethink the way they fill their shelves.