Movies make teens hungry for books

The young adult fiction market is booming, with book sales of �36.1million last year, an increase of 11 per cent on 2011. The rise coincided with the last outing of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.

The young adult fiction market is booming, with book sales of �36.1million last year, an increase of 11 per cent on 2011. The rise coincided with the last outing of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.

Published Jul 8, 2013

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London - Blockbuster films such as The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga are helping to fuel a resurgence in teenagers’ reading, research shows.

The young adult fiction market is booming, with book sales of £36.1million last year, an increase of 11 per cent on 2011.

The rise coincided with the last outing of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, as well as Jennifer Lawrence’s debut performance in The Hunger Games.

This compared to a four per cent decline in adult fiction to £397.5million in 2012.

Figures from Nielsen BookScan, which collates book sales worldwide, underline how crucial movie tie-ins are for publishers.

The top ten best-selling young adult fiction books in the UK since records began in 1998 is dominated by three authors who boast film adaptations – Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy, and The Hunger Games writer Suzanne Collins.

Publishers are vying to fill the gap left by the Twilight films.

Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave is tipped as the next hit, with former Spiderman actor Tobey Maguire snapping up the film rights to the tale of a girl trying to find her brother in the wake of an alien attack. - Daily Mail

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