Could You Handle an Overnight Best-seller? Epicenter Press’ Kent Sturgis talks about how his small press tackled the instant, overwhelming demand for the only Sarah Palin biography.
Extra: What other hurdles did this sudden demand present to you and your staff?
Sturgis: There’s been several issues. … We’re a really small operation. … We only have two phone lines and a fax line. I think that … when McCain made his announcement, hundreds of reporters looked [on] Google, [and] the only thing they could find was this one book. A thousand reporters were calling us all at once to find the author. For a number of hours—for most of that Friday—we could hardly use the telephone. We had to use our cell phones. With a good recommendation, we got a publicist onboard—Andrea Burnett, who is in Berkeley, Calif. She used to do public relations for Chronicle Books. We funneled the media calls to the author through her, and we worked to exploit it to get our name out. The other (issue) was, we have a lot of other projects that we didn’t do a stick of work on in the past week.
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