Very good year for wine expert building online empire

"He just blew me away," Stier says. "He talked about how to use the Web to turn your dreams into your life work, how to monetize your passion. I said, 'That's the book!' " Stier buttonholed him later - and in April, HarperStudio announced the blockbuster Vaynerchuk deal.

Social media have become a rich lode for book ideas. HarperCollins reportedly paid Nick Douglas five figures for an anthology of funny Twitter posts, mostly by celebrities. Behold: Twitter Wit. University of Chicago freshmen Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman thought of squishing the world's great literary works into 20 "tweets" or less - 20 sentences of 140 characters or fewer. They sold the idea to Penguin Classics and now have authored Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. (The Divine Comedy in 2,800 characters!)

Justin Halpern of San Diego started tweeting about his father Sam's funny sayings. He now has 491,757 followers of his daily tweets, sold the rights to It Books, and a book is slated to appear next Father's Day.

Mainstream? Alternative? All media are a linked chain, an eternal golden braid. Literary agents and publishers are trolling blogs, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, looking for the great voices of tomorrow.

"With user counters and user comments, you can often tell how big the audience is and what they're responding to in a writer," says McKean, of Howard Morhaim. "If a blog is getting 50,000 unique hits a day, that's 50,000 people seeing this writer. I can take that to my editor and say, 'Hey, we've got a market here.'

"Web bloggers build communities," McKean says. "But a special kind. It's a personal connection, person by person. It's a conversation."

Vaynerchuk says he thrives on the paradoxical personal appeal of mass-market Webcasts: "What I do is extremely sincere on a personal level.

Crush It! is a "short, tight, fast-read book" (the author's words) about creating a Web-based approach to your very own business. "It's also about working happier," he says. "If you're working 17 hours a day for $100,000, consider taking a lower-paying 35-hours-a-week job, stay home, and make a Web site about NASCAR, macrame, tomato sauce, whatever you love."

It takes an immigrant to be this American. Vaynerchuk was born in what is now Belarus in 1975 and came to this country in 1978. "Having nothing and fighting for what I wanted made me hungrier," he says. "Hey, I think like an immigrant. I see the economic downturn as an opportunity. We've exposed the frauds among all the big, established money guys. Why not be honest and a success? And do it yourself, using all the media you can find?"

The immigrant's tale, vintage 2009. "To be honest, I'm not as big at this point in my life as I thought I would be," Vaynerchuk chuckles. "It's funny - I'm working so hard, but I'm laughing all the time."