[Still Jack]

Originally Posted by Guardian

Hundreds gather to meet Palin on first stop of book tour

Former Alaska governor to hit small towns across US to tout her bestselling memoir Going Rogue

Cover of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue: An American Life. Photograph: AP/Harper

Cover of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue: An American Life. Photograph: AP/Harper

Sarah Palin has reaffirmed her ability to pull in the crowds, with almost a thousand people queuing up for hours to attend her first book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan today.

The first supporters to appear camped outside the town's Barnes & Noble bookstore overnight, and several hundred more were turned away by mid-morning as crowds gathered well ahead of the evening event.

Grand Rapids is the first of 25 stops in Palin's much-hyped book tour for her memoir Going Rogue: An American Life. The largely small-town venues, including Fort Wayne in Indiana and Washington, Pennsylvania, have been chosen more for their conservative Republican sympathies than for their traditional book-selling potential.

Grand Rapids is particularly resonant as the location of the start of the tour, as it is an influential power base for rightwing Republicans in the US heartlands. It is frequently chosen by politicians as a platform from which to launch political campaigns.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential candidate last year, came to Grand Rapids yesterday for a signing of his new book, A Simple Christmas, and was duly overshadowed by his potential rival from Alaska for the Republican nomination in 2012. He said of Palin: "I have great admiration for her. She's a rock star in our party."

Going Rogue — titled after the nickname McCain advisers pinned on Palin during the campaign after she went off-message — has been doing a roaring trade even before it hit bookshops yesterday. It has been towards the top of Amazon's bestselling list for weeks.

One person who will not be among the throngs queuing to buy it is Barack Obama, who said he was unlikely to read it. "She and I have different political philosophies and it's probably not the person I look to to see how our administration is doing," he told CBS in Beijing.

So far the week's closely orchestrated unveiling of the book has gone like clockwork for Palin, further boosting her already nationwide fame. Even negative publicity has worked in her favour.

When Newsweek put her on its cover this week with the headline "How do you solve a problem like Sarah?" it provoked a storm of protest about its choice of photograph, a shot of her in shorts with legs bare taken from Runner's World magazine.

She leapt on it, denouncing it as "sexist and oh-so-expected by now".

Claim and counterclaim swirled around the internet, which can only have been beneficial for Palin and her book, forcing a statement from Newsweek who insisted its picture selection had been "gender-neutral".

'Tis a dark day for literature and humanity. Here I was, think Twilight was already inhumane enough, then she comes along and makes my hope for humanity dwindle further into the abyss of shitty "literature", and worse politicians...