Stephenie Meyer

The second installment of Veronica Roth's dystopian trilogy, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, grabbed $52.3 million in its opening weekend at the U.S. box office, just shy of Divergent's $54.6 million debut last year. Clocking $47 million worldwide, Insurgent brings the teen action franchise's total earnings to a plump $388 million so far, with two movies still to come.

Roth, who earned an estimated $17 million last year selling some 7 million books, is but one of many ink spillers whose literary successes have translated into box office hits. Nearly a quarter of the 200 top-grossing films worldwide tallied by Box Office Mojo have been directly adapted from books

In a funny way, fan fiction is the purest form of literary art there is, the one most untainted by commerce. It’s hard to make money from it because someone else owns the intellectual property (unless you change the details just enough, in which case you can make quite a lot of money on it. Just ask E.L. James.)

Amazon’s ready to change that. A new program called Kindle Worlds will let would-be writers publish, and profit from, fan-fictional e-books with the blessing of the original characters’ creators…

The standoff between publishers and libraries over e-books is rapidly easing.

On Wednesday, Hachette Book Group became the fourth major publisher this year to announce it was expanding its digital offerings to libraries. Hachette, whose authors include Stephenie Meyer and Malcolm Gladwell, will offer its entire e-catalog to libraries after two years of pilot programs. New books will be available simultaneously in paper and e-editions, a policy also recently adapted by Penguin Group (USA). Hachette, Penguin and other publishers had previously restricted newer works out of concern for lost sales.

Samantha Smith will join Scholastic UK on May 20th as Fiction Publisher. Samantha is currently Editorial Director at Little Brown, where she has worked with authors including P.C. and Kristin Cast, Chris Colfer and Stephenie Meyer.  She will report to Hilary Murray Hill, MD of Scholastic Children’s Books, who has overall responsibility for Scholastic’s trade publishing in the UK.  

Hilary commented, ‘‘Samantha’s appointment will enhance our exceptional editorial team and take the Scholastic fiction list forward in new directions.  I am absolutely delighted that we will be working together”. Samantha said, ''I'm thrilled to be joining Scholastic. It's a house with a brilliant publishing history, one that I very much grew up with, but that remains a vibrant and dynamic part of children's publishing today and is incredibly well-placed to meet the challenges of the market going forward. I'm looking forward to working with the in-house team and their outstanding authors.”

Hachette has entered into new ebook contracts with retailers following the ebook pricing settlement with the Department of Justice. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are now discounting the publisher’s ebooks, and other retailers should follow soon.

This erotica bestseller began as a work of Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe, earning a massive fan fiction following years before the book deal. Most traces of this fan fiction history have been removed from the Internet. Using the Wayback Machine, we were able to take snapshots from James’ old work–getting a peek into the book’s previous incarnation as an X-rated version of the Twilight story.