"They're looking for proven models and tried-and-true sources from which to create books," Kramer says. "Publishers are getting into this pop culture-to-press thing and blogging is hot."
And, adds Kramer, on the phone from his Manhattan office, the medium is still rich with untapped talent.
"Blogging only reached the critical mass tipping point about two years ago -- and it's still tipping," he says.
Pamela Ribon was one of the first notable bloggers to nab a book deal. Her darkly funny 2002 novel, Why Girls Are Weird, based
loosely on her own experiences as a well-liked online diarist, hit the Amazon Top 200 fiction chart six months before its publication date.
The Austin, Texas-based author has another novel due early next year and she credits her journal for helping her find an audience -- although these days it sometimes works the other way around.
"I still get a few e-mails a day from someone who has stumbled upon the book and then found the Web site," Ribon wrote in an e-mail to the Sacramento Bee. "The blog keeps me in constant contact with my audience, so I have a good idea who I'm writing for."
Indeed, it's not always a case of putting the blog before the book.
Keith Thomson didn't have an online presence before he signed a deal for his high-seas caper, Pirates of Pensacola, but the format helped generate enough interest to push the title to the top of Amazon.com's "early adopters" pre-sales list.
In turn, Thomson says his blog, a fictional chronicle of his book's characters and adventures, brought him invaluable support and feedback -- he used reader responses to tweak the final version of the book.
The format, he says, is "the great new minor leagues for writers" seeking an audience and a book deal.
"If you're an agent and hear about 10,000 people who are excited about a blog -- I think you'd have to pay attention to that," he says.
Lynch, the Riverhead book editor, agrees. But, she adds, if anyone is looking to blogs to revolutionize the publishing industry, think again -- this isn't really a case of new school publishing vs. old school.
"Blogging is a new form, but I think you can compare it to ... something like the success of a (Sex and the City author) Candace Bushnell," Lynch says. "That was the ... model of someone who had a regular column and got a book deal from it. That's what it's like now with blogs."
"I got a fancy degree," she says, "and when I finally do publish a book? It's because of this wacky Internet thing."
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