Midnight release parties are being scheduled for Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers/Associated Press)

Arizona novelist Stephenie Meyer has often said she's astonished to hear her name mentioned in the same breath as J.K. Rowling, author of the most lucrative books in the history of publishing.

And yet the hoopla surrounding the release of the final novel in the author's Twilight series — Breaking Dawn — is decidedly Harry Potter-esque in its scale and scope.

The book goes on sale in North America at midnight on Friday, and tens of thousands of Meyer fans are expected at bookstores across the continent in order to get first dibs on the fourth and final instalment to discover what becomes of series heroine Bella and her vampire sweetheart Edward.

Chapters-Indigo stores across Canada are hosting midnight masquerade parties to celebrate the release.

Thirteen-year-old Ru MacDonald is among the Canadian fans caught up in the excitement.

The Halifax teen was in the city's Woozles Children's Bookstore this week snatching up the third instalment in the series, Eclipse, so she can be ready for Friday's release.

"I love them," she said in a telephone interview from the store. "I love them even more than Harry Potter, because they're more grown up and kind of romantic."

7 million copies sold in 20 languages

For Canadian distributor H.B. Fenn, Meyer's Twilight series has been a roaring success, the biggest series it's ever been involved with. The bestselling books have sold seven million copies worldwide and have been translated into 20 languages.

"It's gigantic," said Tom Best, director of marketing for H.B. Fenn. "There are a lot of people saying she's the heir apparent to J.K. Rowling, and there's some good reason for that."

Unlike Harry Potter, however, the readership of the Twilight series is almost entirely female — predominately girls between the ages of 12 and 16. But both Best and Trevor Dayton, vice-president of the children's book division at Chapters-Indigo, say older women are also now beginning to discover the books that Meyer, a 34-year-old Mormon mother of three, conceived of following a dream.

"Every book has doubled the sales of the previous book," Dayton said Thursday. "It's steadily growing, and new readership is coming all the time — daily, in fact."

The runaway success of the series has been largely been fuelled by online fans, Dayton added.

"All of the activity happened in the blogosphere and social networking sites, and that's really where this thing took off," he said.

"Being a teen girl series, I mean it's just so natural for that particular customer and readership to share their enthusiasm electronically, and that's exactly what's happened. And Stephenie Meyer herself, from the outset, has been great about communicating with her fans on her own website, so they're just as actively engaged, if not more actively engaged, in the series as Harry Potter fans were."

While Breaking Dawn is the last in the series to tell the story of Bella and Edward from Bella's perspective, Meyer has said she's working on a prequel and will write more books from other characters' perspectives.

A movie based on the first book in the series, Twilight, published in 2005, arrives in theatres this winter.

"I can't wait," said MacDonald. "I am going to be standing in line to see that movie. It's going to be awesome."