Despite Massive First Print, Palin’s Publisher Printing Another 1 Million Copies Of Her Book

Wow:

NEW YORK — “Going Rogue” is going big.
Publisher HarperCollins said Friday that Sarah Palin’s memoir sold 300,000 copies its first day, among the best openings ever for a nonfiction book. In 2004, Bill Clinton’s “My Life” debuted with sales of 400,000 copies. The year before, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “Living History” started at 200,000.
“Going Rogue” was released this week and its print run already has been increased from 1.5 million copies to 2.5 million, HarperCollins announced Friday. Palin, the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate, is in the midst of a nationwide promotional tour.

Allah points out this earlier Daily Beast post which, given the numbers, indicates that Palin is far exceeding expectations:

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.

Given that HarperCollins just added a million books to the first print, clearly Palin has hit a grand slam.
And I’m assuming these are just numbers for the print version. The Kindle version (which is still in pre-order mode) will have significant numbers too, I’m sure. Right now the hard copy version of the book is topping Amazon’s bestsellers list. In spot four is Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Palin’s book, I’m assuming because it’s still in pre-order, isn’t on the Kindle bestsellers list just yet, but Brown’s book has spent 67 days in that list and at one point the Kindle version of his book had outsold the hard copy version.
What does all that mean? It’s hard to calculate digital sales, but I’m guessing we can safely pencil in several hundred thousand additional digital sales for Palin.
The bottom line? Palin-mania is exceeding everyone’s expectations.