Kenmore resident Kent Sturgis hit the publisher’s jackpot when Republican Sen. John McCain tapped a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate for the presidential election.

McCain’s unexpected choice left reporters and common voters alike scrambling for information about Sarah Palin, a hockey mom-turned-executive.

Sturgis, who owns Epicenter Press, has produced the candidate’s only biography.

Not since Jon Krakaur wrote “Into the Wild” have American readers been so hungry for Alaska non-fiction.

Palin’s biography rocketed to the No. 7 spot of Amazon.com’s best-seller list just two days after McCain made his announcement, and retailers nationwide have been ringing Epicenter to order more copies.

“We’ve definitely had a strong demand,” said Wendy Manning, a senior manager at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. “We just can’t get our hands on any.”

Sturgis has struggled to handle the sudden groundswell of popularity, with only 3,000 copies of the publication left since its first printing.

He had received more than 72,000 orders from retailers by Sept. 2, plus thousands more requests from individual buyers.

“We’re filling single orders here lickety split,” Sturgis said.

“I can hardly describe what the last few days have been like,” he added. “We lost control of our phones for four, five, six hours after the announcement was made.”

The Palin biography, titled “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down,” sold only 8,000 copies before McCain made his VP selection Aug. 29.

Sturgis had to call a print-on-demand company to rush production of a paperback version 16 hours after the news broke.

Manning claims Third Place Books has already ordered 20 copies.

Epicenter’s most successful publication prior to “Sarah” was “Two Old Women” by Velma Wallis, which sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide in the past 12 years.

The company produced only 50,000 books before selling the re-printing rights to Harper Collins.

“That was a different sort of best seller,” Sturgis said. “It’s popularity built over time and continued to grow for months and months.”

Epicenter Press specializes in non-fiction books about Alaska, and currently has around 100 titles that cover topics like frontier history, bush pilots and sled-dog racing.

Sturgis is an Alaska native and a former journalist who worked as a Seattle bureau chief for the Associated Press and as managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner before establishing Epicenter Press in 1988 with colleague Lael Morgan.

The venture began in Fairbanks, but later moved to Washington because of logistical problems associated with publishing from a remote location before the Internet explosion.

Sturgis hired Alaska author Kaylene Johnson to write “Sarah” after meeting Palin at a campaign fund-raiser in 2006.

“Never in our wildest dreams did we think this would be a best seller,” Sturgis said. “It’s just wonderful to have a book that every book store needs to have.”

Sturgis is a self-proclaimed Democrat, but claims his political leanings never caused him to hesitate on moving forward with the biography.

“I admire (Palin), but I didn’t look at this as a political book,” Sturgis said. “It’s a biography of a woman who became a populist reformer and pulled off a huge upset to become the governor of Alaska. Ordinary people can relate to her.”

• Readers can visit the Epicenter Press Web site at www.epicenterpress.com.