While I'd be lucky to receive and possibly amenable to an advance of $7 when shopping my novel around (publishers, please make note of this!), I still feel for Nate Silver -- that fella who parlayed his talents in clairvoyance from baseball to the election. His $700,000 advance is paltry compared to Sarah Palin's $7 million offer. Consider though, that unlike Silver, Palin's net gains will probably skew close to half a million at most after she's done paying out translators, ghostwriters, copy editors, fact-checkers, and a few Rhodes Scholars to gussy her up in print. And at that point, she will have successfully become America's biggest oxymoron -- a member of the same liberal media elite that she loathes. In the meantime, this looks to be a promising piece of literature, even if it doesn't contain cameos by Shirley Manson.