Sarah Palin’s 432-page memoir is still No. 1, looks like a first printing of 1.5 million copies was a good idea!

Booksellers have begun fighting for sales with pre-orders. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. cut the $28.99 list price by more than half, to $13.50, and Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com are offering “Going Rogue” for $15.65, a 45 percent discount.

Although she resigned abruptly last summer as governor, and the Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain and Palin was decisively beaten in the 2008 election, “Going Rogue” will surely outsell the memoir of her Democratic counterpart, Vice President Joe Biden, and likely approach the million-selling heights of President Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.”

“I know a lot of people who are surprised by this,” says Adrian Zackheim, president and publisher of Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group (USA). “There was some question as to whether her popularity was still intact after she resigned as governor and some question as to whether the original following was still with her. The answer to these questions is pretty unequivocal.”

“In a similar way, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin provide an opportunity for ideologically motivated consumers to see their views validated. It’s the political equivalent of attending a Grateful Dead concert. Pure and simple, it’s market democracy.”

Karp calls the title “brilliant” and says it “suggests she’ll let it all hang out,” a likely attraction for customers on Amazon, which lists purchasers of Palin’s book as also buying “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense” and Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny.”

Palin herself has said that “Going Rogue” will give her a chance to express herself “unfiltered,” a bold brand for a public figure who has likened herself to a pit bull with lipstick and once alleged that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” Palin’s collaborator, Lynn Vincent, has her own history of attacking the left. She is the co-author of “Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party.”

“That sounds pretty lively,” says Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing, which released Malkin’s book. “Palin is certainly well positioned to take on the bureaucrats and government establishment, but she also may be positioning herself for a run at the (2012) nomination and that might have its own discipline.”

“Palin is going to appeal to anyone interested in American culture right now,” says Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham, who declined to offer specifics on the book, whether content or tone.

“Although she has a very strong conservative following, who are with her through thick and thin, she has this large cultural presence that exerts a great deal of fascination. And what we’re seeing here are two vectors coming together.”

The very existence of a Democratic administration means material for conservatives. In the 1990s, Ann Coulter and Barbara Olson were among those who wrote best-selling attacks against President Bill Clinton. Al Franken, Michael Moore and other liberals were popular authors during the Bush administration. Now, says Ross, as Democrats reign in Washington, “conservatives have been energized.”

“They have really come out of the lethargy they were stuck in last year,” she says.