BYU grad's vampire tale eclipses Harry Potter on book list

OREM — Teens and adults who devoured the seventh and final Harry Potter book last month sank their teeth into "Eclipse" this week.

The book by Brigham Young University graduate Stephenie Meyer is so hot it knocked "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" out of first place on the national Barnes & Noble fiction best-seller list.

Strong sales were expected because the first book in Meyer's series, "Twilight," is No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for children's paperback chapter books, and the second book, "New Moon," is No. 1 on the Times' hardback list.

But the release of "Eclipse" turned into a publishing phenomenon that surprised everyone from the book buyer at the BYU Bookstore, which sold 400 copies in the first two hours on Tuesday, to the book's publisher — Little, Brown Books — which hoped to sell 40,000 copies on the first day only to see 150,000 fly off the shelves.

"I've been in the business for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this," publisher Megan Tingley told Wall Street Journal. Utah booksellers and libraries can't keep up with the demand as readers thirst to learn which of two boys heroine Bella Swan will choose, the werewolf or the vampire.

And if she falls for the vampire, will she choose to remain human or to become a vampire herself?

Utah booksellers and librarians say demand in the state is magnified because of Meyer's tie to BYU and her membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though the book is set in Washington, not Utah or Meyer's home state of Arizona, and doesn't mention religion.

The BYU Bookstore sold all 500 copies it had on Tuesday. BYU has ordered 500 more copies but won't get them for a week or more.

"We knew we'd sold scobs of the other two books, but we didn't expect this," said Janice Card, teen and children's book-buyer at the BYU Bookstore. "I wish we'd ordered 1,000 to begin with. We've had a lot of disappointed people come in."

It seems to workers that every other time the phone rings at the Barnes & Noble, the caller asks about "Eclipse."

"We had more than 1,000 people come to the midnight release party to pick up the book," department manager Shannyn Weaver said.

That was just the beginning. The national book chain has made it a priority to get books to the Orem store because it has sold more copies of "Eclipse" than any book in Utah and Idaho and has more reservations for the book than any other store in the chain .

The store is in a daily scramble, with hundreds of new books shipped in each day while hundreds of new reservations pour in at the same time. As soon as the books come in, store employees call desperate readers.