Poster for Twilight Photo: Maoyan

Midnight Sun, the fifth book in the young adult series Twilight, will be published on August 4, US novelist Stephenie Meyer announced Monday. The book was originally set to be released in 2008, but this plan was canceled after Meyer's manuscript leaked. After more than a decade of waiting, some Chinese fans hailed the news as "a renaissance in 2020." 

The hashtag for the new book had attracted 160 million views and 38,000 posts by excited fans on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo by Wednesday. Some were eagerly asking for the Chinese version's release date while others wondered whether this means there will be a new film.  

While some Chinese netizens doubted that there will be a film with the original cast, most happily shared photos of their collections of the books and films and some of them described the series as "the memory of my youth."  

The first four books were released between 2005 and 2008, while the Chinese versions were published by China's Jieli Publishing House in 2008. Twilight has been regarded as a "super bestseller series" in China like Harry Potter. On Chinese media review website Douban, the scores for the four books range from 7.6/10 to 7.8/10. 

"Although the first two books were bestsellers in North America, they hadn't received much attention from Chinese publishers given the cultural differences… Meanwhile, the reception was not very great in Asian countries and regions such as Japan, South Korea and the island of Taiwan. The sales were just average, which exacerbated publishers' concerns," Chen Yong, editor of the Twilight series at the Jieli Publishing House, told the Global Times on Saturday. 

But the situation started to change after Eclipse, the third book in the series published in August 2007. Chen recalled that the book sold 150,000 copies worldwide on its first day of release. At the Beijing International Book Fair held in September 2007, the Jieli Publishing House had to compete with several other publishers to attain the rights to the books.

"It is a romance novel under the cover of a story about vampires. With the eye-catching elements of legends, werewolves, campus, suspense and adventure, we want to reproduce the books' essence about romance against its supernatural background. The strongest feelings of the book would be the beautiful love," said Chen, addressing a common concern Chinese publishers had that vampires and werewolves do not have wide appeal in China. 

The books turned out to be a hit in the Chinese mainland. Within a year of the simplified Chinese version's release, it sold more than 1.5 million copies. When the movie starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson was released in the US in 2008 and the Chinese mainland in 2009, the popularity of the saga continued to increase. According to Chinese ticketing and box-office data platform Maoyan, the first film in the series, Twilight, earned 12.42 million yuan ($1.75 million) in the mainland, an impressive take at the time. 

The films' success in the Chinese mainland appears to have further contributed to the books' sales. While waiting for the release of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn parts one and two, many curious Chinese fans were dying to know what would happen and so turned to the books for answers. 

The cover of the Chinese version of Twilight Photo: Courtesy of the Jieli Publishing House

By October 2019, the simplified Chinese version of the books had sold 4.24 million copies and earned a total of 166 million yuan. Twilight, the first book performed the best, selling 1.08 million copies, Jieli Publishing House told the Global Times. 

"The popularity of the Twilight series can be attributed to the writer's realistic and detailed writing about the young protagonists' emotional confusion and struggles in their youth. The intertwined plotlines and elegant writing evoked readers' imagination. The bizarre and thrilling atmosphere excited them and made them want to continue reading," said Chen.