The excitement over “Breaking Dawn” is building in St. Louis and elsewhere. One store spokeswoman told me they predict 500 in attendance for the midnight party tonight.
And obviously some of you posters are planning on attending parties.
If you want to post some details about a party, please do. Did you wear a costume? Was the excitement comparable to the Potter excitement (if you’re a Potter fan)?  

Entertainment Weekly will have a web stream of video from a  Stephenie Meyer concert tonight. Here’s the link to watch Meyer and Justin Furstenfeld live: www.ew.com/breakingdawn. (The concert is at 6 p.m. and replayed at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. central as far as I can make out.)

In the meantime, I have read that the publicist for “Breaking Dawn” says that the first three books in the series sold more than 5.3 million copies in the United States since “Twilight” debuted in 2005.
For the fourth printing, apparently publisher, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is doing a first printing of 3.5 million books.
So how does that compare to the final “Harry Potter”? The first printing of that book was reported to be about 12 million. The sixth book in the “Potter” series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” sold 6.9 million copies in 24 hours, according to publisher Scholastic.
So it does appear that Little Brown expects the final in the “Twilight” series to sell at first about one-fourth the number of the final in the “Potter” series.
So are those numbers enough to warrant midnight parties? Sure, if the bookstores make enough profit to cover the employees’ pay, I guess. The hope for stores is always that customers will buy other books, too, and keep coming back.

What we’ve seen so often in this kind of scenario is an entertainment form, whether novels, movies, whatever, become even more beholden to best sellers and blockbusters. Mid-list books, modest movies, etc., then have more problems getting financial support because everyone just wants the next blockbuster fix.

Do the Meyer books encourage you to read more books overall and support little-known authors and books? Is that important to you?

It’s certainly more fun to read books that others read so you can talk about them. That’s the point of book clubs - the mini-parties of the reading circuit. One selling point for book clubs (at least to some adults!): You get to bed at a decent hour. But maybe that’s for those who prefer realistic fiction over mysterious tales full of fangs or wizardry.