Sarah Palin sold 300,000 copies of Going Rogue on its first day of sale and, the Daily Beast argues, joined the nation’s elite in her earning power. “Sales are phenomenal, and we are convinced that the book will continue to sell phenomenally for some time to come,” says an insider at HarperCollins, Palin’s publisher. The former vice-presidential candidate got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 per cent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance, which is the total number in print. It’s unlikely she will—an ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins hopes to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $5.2 million, but HarperCollins, which will start entering the black once Palin sells 700,000 copies, $7 million of its own. Any way you carve it, Going Rogue looks to be a $12 million goldmine. When the Daily Beast gets into the more speculative business of estimating what wall-to-wall media coverage—”Fox News was practically slobbering over the woman 24/7”—was worth, it figures the Palin Package provided another $4.55 million to the media alone. Palin’s own payday, the site reckons, should hit the $20-milion mark by July.