Palin gets $1.25m first cheque for her memoir

American reporters itching to know what Sarah Palin will make out of her memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, already a bestseller before its publication on November 17, got a hint of her earnings when a financial disclosure was filed yesterday. It showed the former Alaska governor was paid an upfront "retainer" of $1.25m.

The sum was revealed in a disclosure to the Alaska Public Offices Commission covering Palin's earnings from January 1 until her sudden resignation on July 26. No further details of the so-called retainer are available and the Washington lawyer who brokered her deal with HarperCollins, Robert Barnett, has declined to comment.

But based on normal publishing practice, it is likely the $1.25m is just the first of three cheques, adding up to a total "advance" on royalties of $3.75m: one third on signing the deal, one third on delivery (that was in August, after the period covered by the disclosure) and the final third on publication in mid-November.

Of course, Palin could earn a lot more than that with actual royalties, given the advance orders on the book - so strong that it has been at the top the bestsellers list in the US ahead of publication, even beating Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. HarperCollins are said to have ordered an initial print run of 1.5 million.

The only glitch on the horizon is whether Palin's followers, some of them strangers to bookstores, will be confused when they find their way to their local Borders on November 17 and find not only Going Rogue, but two spoof books called Going Rouge.

One, subtitled An American Nightmare (pictured above right), is a collection of essays put together by two editors of the leftwing journal the Nation; the other is a "colouring book" from the husband and wife team, cartoonist Julie Sigwart and political satirist Michael Stinson.

No doubt Palin will use her eve-of-publication appearance on Oprah on November 16 to explain the differences between the three. ·