Plots

Plots are very important to a novel.  It can be anything, even a meandering journey of a person in high school or middle school or college.  It could be completely irrelevant to normal life.  It could only focus on a love triangle among a normal being and two supernatural creatures.  The point is, plot can fluctuate.  A lot.
Though your writing style can make or break your novel, your plot is probably what people are going to compare to other things (though your writing style is important in comparisons, too... but that's for another post).  For example, when I've noticed comparisons between the Twilight series and the Harry Potter series (or even Twilight and The Hunger Games), a main point that is raised is the plot - how Twilight lacks it, and how Harry Potter is abundantly rife with it.
I may lose a LOT of followers for this, but I will contest that Twilight does have a reasonable sort of plot.  Though I do not entirely like Bella (Sorry, Stephenie Meyer), she does participate in Plot.  How?

Twilight: trying to figure out who/ what Edward is.
New Moon: don't let Edward do stupid stuff.
Eclipse: Don't die, and don't let anyone get killed.
Breaking Dawn: protect your kids!

See?  That's plot!  Though the overarching plot is not something entirely to my taste, and all the action sequences only showed up in the climax instead of being spread out, it was not a terrible concept.  On the other hand, though the concept wasn't terrible, the execution may have been kind of lacking (I don't remember; the last time I read any Twilight book all the way through was in freshman year of high school; being a college freshman, it's been a while).

What the Twilight vs Every Other Novel debate raises is the difference of opinion.  What we can all gather from this is distinct evidence that, no matter how hard you try, you (and especially your novel) are not going to be able to please everyone.  Your novel may be popular with middle school girls and be scorned by the time they reach college.  Your novel might be considered the defining novel of a generation (well, if you write a multi-part series, probably).  Your novel might be rather obscure, and nobody might hear about it until some movie producer reads it, likes it, and decides to offer you a movie deal.  Your novel, like so many, may be rather good, but because there are so many novels out hitting every point on the "how good is this book" spectrum, it may go unnoticed despite the decent product you may have produced.

What draws someone to your book will probably be the little blurb on the back, and if you have a good plot to have a good blurb about, you'll have readers.  Also, if you have a publicity agent and a whole lot else.

But remember: your plot makes your novel.