Twilight' sweeps top 4 spots By Bob Minzesheimer and Anthony DeBarros, USA TODAY

Twilight' sweeps top 4 spots

By Bob Minzesheimer and Anthony DeBarros,

USA TODAY

Led by Stephenia Meyer’s Twilight series, vampires devoured

USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list in 2009.

For the second year in a row, Meyer swept the top four spots. No other author — not even J. K. Rowling  — has done that in the list's 16-year history.

Meyer's coattails pulled 16 other vampire titles onto the list of the year's 100 most popular books.

"Meyer had an unbelievable impact," says Michael Norris, books analyst for Simba Information, a market-research firm. He wonders what publishers will do when what he calls " 'the vampire industrial average' falls. Every cycle has an end."

But for now, Meyer — who has also benefited from Twilight movie adaptations, with more to come — has turned "the YA (young adult) category into the PG-13 of books," he says. "She's not just read by tweens and teens, but by a lot of 30-year-old women."

No matter who's reading them, books for kids and teens accounted for 29% of sales tracked in 2009 — the highest percentage in the list's history, up from 28% in 2008 and 22% in 2007.

OTHER 2009 TRENDS IN BOOKS

Escapism thrives:In the worst economy in 80 years, fiction accounted for 76% of the titles in the top 150 each week. That's the highest percentage in the list's history. Norris says that "2009 was so stressful people just wanted an escape."

Literature lives:After winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge ended the year at No. 56. Defying conventional wisdom that Americans don't read books in translation, Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, first published in Swedish, was No. 28.

Classics fall:Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, remains the oldest book in the top 100, but dropped to No. 93, from No. 52 in 2008. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, No. 95 in 2008, dropped off the list. Schools are giving students more choices on reading lists.

E-books land:In July, USA TODAY became the first best-seller list to include Amazon's Kindle sales, and it added Barnes & Noble's e-books sales last month.

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