Sarah Palin's Going Rogue going great guns at the tills
Former vice-presidential candidate's memoir racks up 300,000 sales on its first day in shops
Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 November 2009


Left - Going Rogue a go-go ... fans wait to have their books signed at the Woodland Mall in Kentwood, Michigan on 18 November. Photograph: Jeff Kowalsky/EPA

Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, has become one of the bestselling non-fiction books in history after it sold 300,000 copies in its first day on sale.

Palin's publisher HarperCollins told American press that Going Rogue has proved so popular it has been forced to print an extra 300,000 books after an initial print run of 1.5m, with about 300,000 sold on 17 November – its day of publication – alone. Going Rogue is currently sitting at the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list, ahead of Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and Stephen King.

Palin's first-day sales are behind Bill Clinton's, whose 2004 memoir My Life sold 400,000 in its first 24 hours, but ahead of Hillary Clinton's, whose autobiography Living History broke records when it was published in 2003, selling 200,000 copies on publication day. The figures are nonetheless a long way behind fiction sales: Brown's The Lost Symbol sold more than 1m copies in the US, UK and Canada in its first day in the shops, while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 2.6m copies in its first 24 hours in the UK alone.

Fans have been turning out in their thousands to meet Palin, who last week embarked on a three-week, 14-state tour of the American heartland. "I'm most looking forward to meeting many of you, shaking your hands, and telling you, 'Thanks for loving America'. I'll give you a scoop here and tell you what's on the book's Dedication Page – it's dedicated to you – Patriots – who love the USA as much as I do," the former Republican vice-presidential candidate wrote on her Facebook page before she set off. "I can't wait to see you! God bless the fight for freedom! Keep up the great work, Patriots who love this country."
Read the rest of Alison Flood's story at The Guardian.