Book Tour

As Sarah Palin begins a book tour Tuesday in Phoenix that will take her to the early presidential voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, the former Alaska governor seems to have set her sights on something grander than mere wealth and fame. After all, in two short years, she has become a political star, a publishing star and now a television star. So what's left to conquer? Well, maybe the White House. In a rare newspaper interview, Palin confirmed to the New York Times Magazine that she is discussing with her family whether she should run for president.

With appearances on prime-time television and Kanye West's Twitter feed, former President George W. Bush emerged from self-imposed exile last week for a book tour that was both serious and surreal. His defenders relished a chance at redemption for a man who left office with dismal approval ratings. His critics recoiled at reminders of scars. Bush, never a man to mince words, had a message for them all: Don't get used to it. "After selling this book, I'm heading back underground," the 43rd president told NBC's Matt Lauer while promoting his memoir, "Decision Points.

As her reality series is set to debut on the small screen this weekend, Sarah Palin is also gearing up for a 16-stop tour through the heartland to promote her second book. The preliminary schedule for the tour to promote "America by Heart" includes 13 states, two of which are noteworthy for their significance to the presidential nominating process ? Iowa and South Carolina. Other stops are predominantly in the Midwest, and in predominantly Republican states. It begins in Phoenix on Nov. 23, and includes stops in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Kentucky.

Former President George W. Bush was conspicuously absent from the midterm election campaign, despite Democratic efforts to resurrect him as a political punching bag. But just a week later, the former president is back in the public eye, launching a publicity tour for his book "Decision Points," which comes out Tuesday. The tour includes a prime-time network special and a visit to Oprah's couch. The book's excerpts and the interviews offer new insight into Bush's presidency, but show a familiar certainty and self-assuredness about the decisions he made.

George W. Bush was conspicuously absent during the midterm election campaign, despite Democratic efforts to resurrect him as a political punching bag. But on the eve of the release of his memoirs, the former president is back in the public eye in a big way, starting a publicity tour that includes a prime-time network special and a visit to Oprah's couch. Excerpts from the book and interviews about it offer new insight into Bush's presidency, but show a familiar certainty and self-assuredness about the decisions he made.

As much as crafters hate to admit it, not all craft projects are created equal. Some are absolutely hideous. Who better to bring this to light than actress and author Amy Sedaris in her new book, "Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People" (Grand Central Publishing), a subversive, hilarious take on the made-by-hand movement. The 304-page book, which Sedaris co-wrote with Paul Dinello, features wide-ranging chapters such as "The Joy of Poverty," "Handicraftable," "Teenagers Have a Lot of Pain," "Crafting for Jesus" and "Sausages.

A dozen years ago, my editor at the Los Angeles Times asked if I wanted to interview novelist Mary Gordon, who was in Los Angeles on a book tour. Enormously pregnant, I said yes, partly because I love Mary Gordon and partly because her hotel was two blocks away from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — if I went into labor during the interview, I figured I could just walk. Given my state and Gordon's sympathetic nature, our conversation turned toward the difficulties of working and, in particular, writing mothers.

A cat peeing in an author's bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger hasd left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of their debut books this fall by jumping in their car for an 8,500-mile, 27-day, do-it-yourself tour. They didn't have much choice. As the business of publishing changes, book tours increasingly look like bad risks.

Get ready for another political book tour. Also another political reinvention. A former Republican governor in mostly Democratic Massachusetts, Mitt Romney has long defied easy description. He ran for president in 2008 by banking hard to his conservative side, convinced by his strategists that there was an opening to the right of maverick moderate Republican John McCain. He worked to raise money and offer advice to long-shot Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown, but he stayed in the background (until Brown's victorious election night)

In 1982, reviewing Sue Grafton's first private detective novel, "A Is for Alibi," the pseudonymous New York Times crime fiction critic Newgate Callendar wondered, "Will the series take hold? This first book is competent enough, but not particularly original." Twenty-seven years on, Callendar's dismissive attitude toward the book -- and its tough-minded thirtysomething heroine Kinsey Millhone -- demonstrates the dangers of prognostication and how instantaneous judgments don't age well. Grafton's alphabet-titled series not only took hold, but the books are also available in 28 countries (and 26 languages)