Gary Vay•ner•chuk Turns His Internet Celebrity Into A Seven-Figure Book Deal

Garyvee (aka Gary Vay•ner•chuk) is crushing it. The wine retailer-turned-video-blogger is cashing in his Internet fame for a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio. That comes to at least $100,000 per book, which is decent for first-time an unproven author, but he is going to have to hustle to keep up the interest for ten books. His first one comes out in September, and is called: Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World.

One thing Vay•ner•chuck has going for him is a built-in audience he cultivated one e-mail at a time, starting with his his popular video wine blog, Wine Library TV. Then he started branching out beyond wine into marketing, motivational speaking, other Web video shows, wine-review site Corkd, and even T-shirt search (because everyone is always looking for a good T-shirt).

So can Garyvee turn his 80,000 daily videoblog fans and 160,000 Twitter followers into actual paying customers for his book series? Do those people even read books anymore? If only 10 percent end up buying each book, HarperStudio will be happy.

Update: Vay•ner•chuk responds in a few places via video in comments below. In this comment, he points out that what attracted him to HarperStudio is a 50/50 revenue share (presumably once each book hits profitability) which gives him a bigger upside should the books do well. That is a much more entrepreneurial model than most book publishers are comfortable with, and hopefully we’ll be seeing more like them.