Wow: Palin’s publisher boosts print run from 1.5 million to 2.5 million

Three days after the book dropped, having already produced an enormous first run, they’re forced to ramp it up by two-thirds to meet demand. Amazing. Imagine the number if the book was being carried in San Francisco.

To put this in perspective, revisit this passage from yesterday’s Daily Beast item announcing that she’d moved 300,000 units on day one:

Going Rogue is going gangbusters, and it looks like both Palin and her publisher, HarperCollins, are going to make some serious money off of it. According to industry insiders, Palin got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 percent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that HarperCollins had printed another 100,000 copies of Going Rogue, bringing the total in print to 1.6 million. Palin would need to sell all of those to earn out her advance, so it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.

But HarperCollins will be making money long before that. There’s a rule of thumb in the industry that publishers net about $10 per hardcover sold, after expenses, but before the cost of the advance. Once she’s sold 700,000 copies, then, HarperCollins is in the black. And what of that 1.6 million printed? An ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins thinks it’s going to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $7 million and HarperCollins $5 million of its own.

Assuming HC has that sell-through rate in mind, boosting production to 2.5 million copies means they’re now expecting to sell north of 1.8 million — and that Palin will more than earn out her advance, gigantic as it is at a cool $7 mil. The only questions now are whether they’ll boost production yet again(!) and how long it’ll be before the rumors start about another book. The obvious choice for a topic is the future of conservatism, which won’t sell as much as a personal memoir but will still do plenty of business among grassroots righties, especially if it’s rushed out in time for the midterms. Exit question: You know who I bet is awfully excited about all this? Sarah Palin’s uterus.

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