How Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Got Published

Call it Harry Potter with vampires. Call it a sappy supernatural teenage love story. Call it an annoying chick book.

Whatever you want to call it, you can’t deny that it’s gotten damn popular. I have friends who can’t put the book down, dying to absorb every word, every sentence, every drop of blood in the entire Twilight series.

While talking about it one day, I was pointed to the origins of Twilight and how author Stephenie Meyer came to publish these books. Although I haven’t read the books (and don’t intend to), the description of Meyer’s painful publishing process is really interesting.

Warning: There are plot spoilers in the above link. If you want to read the books but haven’t yet, don’t click on the above link.

In it, she describes everything from how the idea popped into her head (literally, in a dream) to how she used Google (GOOG) to do background research to how she finally found an agent.

To put it mildly, I was naive about publishing. I thought it worked like this: you printed a copy of your novel, wrapped it up in brown paper, and sent it off to a publishing house. Ho ho ho, that’s a good one. I started googling (naturally) and began to discover that this was not the way it is done. (Movies lie to us! Why?! A side note: you will not be able to enjoy the new Steve Martin version of Cheaper by the Dozen when you know how insanely impossible the publishing scenario it contains is.)

Pretty informative, especially if you’re interested in publishing a book.

Author: Mike Lee

An idealistic realist, humanistic technologist & constant student.

3 thoughts on “How Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Got Published”

  1. I cant believe Twilight made it to your blog! Its such a great book you should totally read it.

  2. Heh. That’s okay. I just read the entire synopsis on Wikipedia, so I know what it’s all about. Besides, I’m not a huge fan of chick lit – and from what I’ve heard, this comes close to that, even though it’s technically young adult fiction.

    But I’m happy for this author’s success!

  3. My wife read the entire series in a week. I have never seen her so focused before. Except maybe for our wedding. :D

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