Meet Harper Perennial editor Stephanie Meyers. She has blond hair, an obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and reserves her editing pen for nonfiction books, not writing vampire novels. If you look closely, you will see that her name is only two letters off from the name of Twilight‘s famous author.
Meyers recently co-edited a book of essays entitled The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas with Robin Harvie and it features an essay by writer Andrew Shaffer (better known as Evil Wylie/Emperor Franzen).
However, if you want to find her on Google, you need to be very specific with your keywords. When asked if she would do an interview, the editor responded: “I’d love to talk to you about my name doppelganger situation—anything to reclaim a tiny piece of the Google search pie.” Our interview follows below…
Q: So Ms. Stephanie Meyers, can you please spell you name for me?
A: S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E-M-E-Y-E-R-S.
Q: Have you got a funny anecdote about the connection with your name and the Hachette author that the whole world kind of knows about?
A: Well it was funny, I think the first time it really hit home, I got a phone call on my work line and someone said ‘Is this Stephenie Meyer’s?’ and I said ‘Yes’ and they’re like ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m talking to you!’ And I was confused because you know, I think I’m awesome but most of the rest of the world doesn’t know that much about me and then after ‘Oh, oh, you mean the vampire novelist…’
That was early on and it’s actually not that easy to get through to an editor at a major publishing house so I was pretty impressed that this, I don’t know, pre-teen had actually done so. I explained to her how to write a letter to Stephenie’s agent and kind of walked her through that. And then I started getting fan-mail because HarperCollins published Stephenie in an anthology called Prom Nights from Hell. So it wasn’t until then that I actually started getting the fan mail. And there was like a lot of it at first, now it’s probably maybe like 3 letters a month or so, but so it was kind of like how it started.
Q: Any memorable fan mail encounters?
A: The strangest one, and this was before I realized I was getting her mail was someone I think wanted her to contribute to an anthology about horses and so I thought this package was for me and I was opening it up and I was like ‘Why, why is there a book on horses? Why is there a CD full of horse Christmas carols?’ And then I realized of course its not for me. But, I didn’t know she had anything to do with horses either. And the Twilight Moms of Southern Georgia once sent a really large package.
Q: Have you ever read Twilight?
A: I really only read Twilight because I felt that I should because I’ve had so many conversations about my name that it seemed responsible of me to read one of her books.
Q: Have you ever been in contact with her as a result of this?
A: No, but I always wonder if she’ll say anything to me. When I first started forwarding mail to her agent [Jodi Reamer] I kind of e-mailed it to her saying that ‘Are you the person I should send this too?’ And the agent was like ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you. We’ve sort of been expecting this ever since I heard your name that you would be in touch at one point.’