Twitter's "Garyvee" Vaynerchuk Gets A Book Deal

By SARA NELSON

HarperStudio has signed a seven-figure, 10-book deal with Gary Vaynerchuk, a 33-year-old Belarusian-born wine retailer from New Jersey, who, except for a talk show appearance here and there, is basically unknown in mainstream media circles.

But in the world of the Internet, he is a Twitter phenom, with 145,000 followers hanging on his every tweet. What began as a daily video blog about wine has become a self-help, business-advice juggernaut, with "Garyvee" as chief engineer. As he describes himself online, "I love people, and the hustle." The first book in his series, "Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World," lands in stores in September.

Wine Library

To hear HarperStudio tell it, this is a very important deal, one of the biggest it has made so far, even considering the imprint's relatively low advance-higher royalty split model. (Two agents who didn't wish to be named insist that President Bob Miller has occasionally bid higher than his stated ceiling of 100K. Mr. Miller vehemently denies this. The 10-book deal may be his way of getting the total pay-out up to a figure Mr. Vaynerchuk -- who says he has been offered more by other publishers -- can live with.) And in these days of tight budgets that only loosen for the biggest names, it is indeed notable that someone would spend so much on such an untried author.

Plenty have made plenty on "authors" who come from other media and make good in BookLand; Robert Kiyosaki, for example, was a millionaire motivational speaker and event-meister long before he gave birth to the mega-selling "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" -- and its many spawn. But if Mr. Vaynerchuk is not the first celebrity to leverage his fame with a book deal, he may be the first to have become a celebrity in an era that merges the Internet, a recession, and rampant career dissatisfaction. "I can't tell you how many fix-your-career, reinvent-yourself proposals we've seen in the past few months," one editor at another house tells me. What sets Mr. Vaynerchuk apart from all those guru-wannabes may be that he already has an ardent fan base of frustrated entrepreneuers, the recently downsized and the generally careerologically challenged. He has a "platform," in other words, a built-in audience.

But is a marketer/blogger, who cheerfully admits he doesn't read books, going to be able to sell them to other Internet types who probably don't read much either? It's one thing, after all, to get your career advice for free, simply by turning on your computer -- and another to plunk down $20 for a hardcover book. What both publisher and author are banking on, though, is that people will pony up for a piece of the brand that is Mr. Vaynerhcuk, much as they buy books from and about celebrities they think they already know from TV or movies. Mr. Vaynerchuk -- for so many an aggressive, persistent voice in the ear that counsels "going for it," whatever it is -- suggests his fans will buy his book as a "thank-you play." And he does seem to have special powers of persuasion: the first time he visited the Harper offices, sources say, he wowed the troops by sitting down at the computer and tweeting about the HarperStudio blog, The 26th Story; the group then watched in real time as thousands of people descended upon that blog. "It was a perfect demonstration of the credibility he has established," says Bob Miller.

Besides, Mr. Vaynerhcuk and HarperStudio seem to understand each other's business models and goals. Mr. Miller (whose last act at Hyperion was to turn dying professor Randy Pausch into the author of huge-selling "The Last Lecture") and his team -- which includes SVP, associate publisher Debbie Stier, who initially found, wooed and signed Vaynerchuk -- believe that having a platform, especially an Internet platform, may be the most important element of successful publishing. Besides, the thinking goes, a traditional publishing system that relies on print advertising, reviews and other old fashioned methods to make stars of unknowns is "broken." A fixed model would acknowledge that authors know their own audience and should speak directly to it; that there are too many gatekeepers, those evil restrictors of talent, and not enough handmaidens to help nurture and disseminate it, and that the publishing process should be a partnership in which both author and publisher take equal risks and share equally in the upside. "The publication of this book will be itself a demonstration of Gary's principles," Miller says.

What's left to see now is whether the beloved Internet magician can turn those exciting new media principles into good, old-fashioned, old-media profits.