Blogger starts a blog. Blogger solicits photos or texts or emails. Blogger gets a book deal. That formula has been wildly successful for the last few years, but is showing signs of market saturation.

There were roughly 100 book deals involving blogs or Internet memes last year according to Book Publisher’s Marketplace.

Christopher Weingarten, 31, was one of them. A year ago, he decided to start a blog about dogs, dressed as hipsters. He gets readers to submit photos and attaches a witty caption.

Over three million hits and thousands of submissions later, he just recently landed a book deal, with the book hitting bookstores in July. While the freelance music writer discloses that his book deal was not six-figures, it was “certainly more than the $3,000 advance I got for doing a book about music.”

Blog-to-book deals have also changed the humor genre in general. “Now if you’re funny, you start a blog or a Twitter feed, and cultivate an audience that way and a publisher finds you,” says Patrick Mulligan, Senior Editor at Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin, which specializes in blog-to-book deals.

One of Gotham’s blog-to-books is “Texts From Last Night”, which features random and funny texts sent from submitters, who are typically in a drunken stupor when texting. The blog on which it is based gets around four million page views a day. The book is in its sixth printing. The blog co-founders say the website brought in about one million dollars in revenue last year, and it’s now being converted into a TV show.

They bristle at the notion that they’re taking other peoples’ contributions and running away with the money from an ebook publishing book deal.

Usually publishers require bloggers to put in at least 70 percent new content into the books and often try to market them to a new audience.

“You can’t just sort of repackage the greatest hits on a website,” says Megan Thompson, Senior Literary Agent with LJK Literary Management which represents a number of blog-to-book authors, including the people behind “Geek Dad”, and “Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.” “Why would someone buy the cow if they can get the milk for free?” she says.

Penguin’s Gotham Books was able to find a new audience with the popular LOLcat series. “It’s 50 year old women from the midwest who have ten cats who are buying it,” says Mulligan. “When you make something a book and take it off the Internet, people who never stumble upon this website find it in book form.”

Some overnight authors are commanding lucrative deals, even if it isn’t as frequent as it once was. “When people were going crazy for this stuff, we got into really competitive auctions where people were spending into the mid six-figures for some of these books,” says Mulligan. “That just becomes tough for book publishers to make money.”

Still, the publishing industry is mindful that the genre has some staying power.

“It’s what happens in publishing,” Mulligan says. “Something becomes hot, it becomes over-published, and then it wanes, and then there will be this awesome new blog in 2012, and we’ll go crazy again for it.”

Digital World Book, known as the DBW is the key conference in the publication of books for publishers in the e-books. All the “big six” book publishers are present in quantities never before. Random House will have more than 40 participants, while fewer than 20 came from the publisher in 2010. The digital book world conference began quietly on Monday morning with three sessions focused for a long time, the official opening ceremony will begin at 17 hours, but despite the digital output cautiously DBW 2011 is just quiet – There are over 1,250 registered twice that last year 600.

Since book publishers are here at DBW, mainstream booksellers are also here. Who is here and what they are selling will be evident when the floor show begins 13:00

The session iPad / iPhone has provided an overview of applications and the Apple App Store. It was the kind of session that felt like it was presented to other audiences – do not publish specific, as the meeting of the e-book design and production. The meeting is followed very still ongoing as I write, shows an interest of people in book publishing companies. How they got out of it, maybe they acquired the interest in book publishing and literary agents and tell us later.

Sessions on the morning of Monday, three were in the design of e-books and production, online content strategy and the iPhone / IPAD strategies. It was the first, most of the screws and nuts, which was the subject key retailers were focused on. Speaking directly to the creators of books and production managers, the session included discussions on programming languages and workflow – which suggests that book publishers are now specifically and actively serious about integrating e-Books, e-book publishing, amazon kindle publishing etc into their business model.

Gayle Shanks has fought a sometimes frightening battle against national book chains (mainly in the business to sell and publish a book) for 36 years, so one might expect the independent Tempe bookseller would be overjoyed at news that the goliath Borders is in dire straights.

But that would be like judging a book by its cover.

Sure, Shanks figures the chain’s death would lure its former customers to her Changing Hands store in Tempe.

Yet she sees peril for bookstores, for readers and for the nation’s culture.

Michigan-based Borders is the nation’s second-largest book retailer and its large debts to vendors could take down small book publishers and hurt the surviving ones, Shanks said. That could limit what even the most independent-minded bookseller could offer adventuresome readers.

“I think my biggest concern, really, is what it means for the book publishing world and ultimately what it means for diversity and finding a marketplace that will be diminished,” Shanks said. “We will have fewer authors finding publishers for their books. We’ll find fewer books being published and that might in fact mean that only huge, commercially viable authors will find their books going to market. That worries me.”

Borders has stopped payments to some children’s book publishers, who have in turn cut off shipments of new merchandise. Published reports include speculation that Borders will be forced to reorganize under bankruptcy protection or that its declining sales, market share and stock value will doom it.

Border’s troubles became more apparent after the holiday season, Shanks noted, when it reported disappointing sales even as most retailers and rival Barnes & Noble saw small to large improvements. Amazon.com would likely benefit from a Borders’ failure, but Shanks finds that troubling, too.

“That’s just the best-sellers and one level below,” said Shanks, the store’s co-owner and book buyer. “Unless you know exactly what you want to read, it takes the adventure and the curiosity factor out of what’s involved with finding a new author.”

Borders was the chain that mostly directly challenged Changing Hands, a store Shanks helped found in 1974 in downtown Tempe. Her initial 500-square-foot store expanded multiple times on Mill Avenue, where, roughly a decade ago, Borders opened a 25,000-square-foot store three blocks from Changing Hands.

The independent store opened a second location on McClintock Drive and Guadalupe Road in 1998, closing the downtown one in 2000. Borders later shuttered the downtown store.

Shanks believes Borders’ woes are a typical example of a chain not keeping up with e-book publishing industry trends — especially electronic readers — and not a sign books are obsolete. She’s seen an interest in people reading, whether its books on paper or on e-readers. Even on a weekday afternoon, Shanks said, Changing Hands can be full of customers.

“We really have been doing fine and 2010 was close to a record year for us,” Shanks said.

Borders and Barnes & Noble overbuilt, she said, adding it’s impossible for them to sell the number of books required to pay rent on all the square footage they occupy in the Valley.

A Borders failure would leave three empty stores in the East Valley, at Superstition Springs Mall in Mesa, at a mostly empty shopping center east of Fiesta Mall in Mesa and at the Chandler Pavilions. By comparison, Barnes & Noble operates five East Valley stores.

It’s unclear who would win Borders’ customers – especially from christian book publishers, said Bob Kammrath, a Valley commercial real estate analyst. The consensus was Circuit City’s demise would help Best Buy, he noted, but Target and Walmart turned out to be the big winners. He doesn’t believe Barnes & Noble is robust enough now to undertake any significant expansion into Borders’ former locations.

Kammrath doesn’t see many other chains filling empty spaces in the Valley in 2011, either. But unlike the past years of massive self-publishing store closings that have hurt or devastated some Valley shopping centers, Kammrath doesn’t expect a Borders’ failure would hurt the market significantly.

“That doesn’t mean all this empty space is going to lease up but at least it’s not going to get much worse,” Kammrath said.

Several big name book publishers have indicated immediate interest in wake of the NaNoWriMo madness ending, and a fresh crop of writers can now call themselves “novelists.”

These budding wordsmiths participated in the National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” for short, from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30. The challenge: Within the 30-day timeframe, write a 50,000-word novel (the approximate equivalent of 175 pages). Everyone who finishes is a “winner”; there is no judging according to a book publisher, and there are no tro­phies or awards. Just the satis­faction of having accomplished what so many dream of: writing one’s own novel.

The local participants gath­ered for a party at a restaurant this past week to celebrate their successes and share their war stories. Most who came to the party were winners.

The one major difference was in how quickly they finished. Some took right up until the fi­nal hour Nov. 30; others, like Misty Corrales, finished way early. She was the word count leader from the first day and was motivated to keep the top spot. She finished her novel in two weeks.

Her husband, Johnathan Cor­rales, didn’t fare so well. It was his first attempt at NaNoWri­Mo, so he has a better idea what to expect next time.

“With all that freedom, I got lost,” Johnathan Corrales said. “It has a life of its own. It was going somewhere, but it didn’t go anywhere.”

Misty Corrales and Matthew Givens served as the unofficial organizers for the local “wri­mos,” as they’re called. Givens, a computer programmer by trade, created a website specifi­cally for the River Region writ­ers, where they could report their progress each day — which is how Corrales knew she was in the lead.

The national NaNoWriMo website featured online forums divided up by area, so the wri­mos could communicate with each other and offer moral sup­port. Most at the party loved having the forum to find like-minded writers who were slog­ging through the process, strug­gling with the same demons as everyone else.

The biggest of those demons: procrastination.

“That daily word count sug­gestion? Good advice to follow!” said Audrey McMullen, a win­ner this year. She finished at 11:57 p.m. Nov. 30. (The suggest­ed word count to hit per day is 1,500 to 1,600).

“The first week or so, I hit my word count every day,” McMul­len said. “Then I’d have to sprint to catch up.”

McMullen also struggled with her internal editor, that nag­ging voice that sits just over a writer’s shoulder and plants seeds of doubt — often at the worst time.

The NaNoWriMo website warns against listening to that editor or book publisher. In fact, the site advises writers to focus on quantity, not quality. That’s the only way to pound it out in a month’s time.

“I had my NaNo rules,” said Felicia Humphrey, who had to figure out how to write around her family obligations. “I’d pret­ty much wait until (my chil­dren) were asleep. I had my lap­top with me everywhere.”

Some of the writers benefited from a little time off: Shirley Burton was off work for three weeks. Givens took two weeks off from work, ostensibly to spend time with his in-laws, but having the book as a diversion was no doubt a nice bonus.

For him and the others, the word-count validation was the real payoff. Wrimos send their books to a robotic word counter, which gives the official count.

“I geeked out about winning,” Givens said.

As the wrimos looked ahead to next year with several book publishers expressing strong interest — virtually all of them want to do it again — Misty Corrales summed up the experience.

“On Nov. 1, we met as aspiring writers. We met on Dec. 1 as novelists.”

That’s certainly true of Pat Conroy, the best-selling autobiographical novelist.

Reading, along with writing, saved his life, he says.

Novels, from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, helped rescue him from an abusive father, who “confused me about what it meant to become a man,” and unwittingly served as the model for Bull Meecham in The Great Santini.

The 15 essays in My Reading Life, some previously published, should delight curious readers, even those who aren’t big fans of the lush torrents of words in Conroy’s novels that include The Prince of Tides and most recently, South of Broad.

The essays celebrate his favorite novels, fictional characters and several real-life heroes — a teacher, a book publisher, and most of all, Conroy’s self-taught mother, who raised him “to tell the stories that will make all our lives clear.”

He writes, “Peg Conroy used reading as a text of liberation, a way out of the sourceless labyrinth that devoured poor Southern girls like herself.”

She read what her son, a lonely military brat, was assigned in school: “Only after her death did I realize that my mother entered The Citadel the same day I did. She made sure that her education was identical to mine. She knew Milton’s Paradise Lost a whole lot better than I did.”

Whether or not you share Conroy’s love of Gone With the Wind (“It will long be a favorite of any country that ever lost a war,” he writes), he’s fun to read and debate.

English teachers looking for new ways to excite students would do well to cite Conroy:

“Before I’d ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago’s Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary — I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books.”

Newspapers and book publishers used to tout, “News you can use.” Call this “Fiction you can use.”

An Australian book publishers claim that he debuted the world’s biggest book at a German book fair are inaccurate, according to self-publishing information from Guinness World Records sent to TODAYshow.com Thursday.

The largest book in the world measures 13.71 by 12.36 feet and weighs more than 1.2 tons, spokesperson Sara Wilcox said. The only copy was completed in Hungary on March 21, 2010.

Gordon Cheers, the managing director of the Australian book publishing company, Millennium House, told the AFP that his 6-by-9 foot atlas, titled “Earth, Platinum edition,” was the world’s largest. “This is the first time a book this size has ever been seen,” he said, adding that his company would only print 31 copies, each going for about $100,000.

“It’s all about creating a legacy,” he told the AFP. “Today, everything is digital and it’s gone in a second. This will still be around in 500 years.”

In a statement to TODAYshow.com, Suzanne Gross, an official from Millennium House, indirectly questioned Guinness’ definition of “book.”

“When is a book a book? If there is only one copy produced is it a ‘book’? … Anyone can grab two huge planks of wood, hinge them together and paste in some paper and call it a book,” Gross wrote, noting that there will be 31 copies of “EARTH, platinum edition.”

“Platinum is not big because it can be. Platinum is big because it needs to be. That’s a book,” she said.

An image of the book that currently holds the title is visible on the right.

“EARTH” may still nab a Guinness World Record. It likely could receive the award for world’s largest atlas.

The current record-holder belongs to the Klencke atlas, which was made in 1660 as a royal gift. Wilcox said it measures just smaller than 6-by-3.5 feet, belongs to the British Library and was measured on Feb. 2, 2010.

Guinness World Records hasn’t yet received a request to verify the book publisher’s claim, Wilcox said Wednesday.

Further Info:

• Publish A Book
• Christian book publishers

Amazon is expanding its stronghold on the e-book market with the launch of an internet-wide, cross-platform embeddable reading widget called “Kindle for the Web.”

Kindle for the Web lets readers preview and share the first chapter of books without needing to leave their browser or open a separate program.

“With Kindle for the Web, it’s easier than ever for customers to sample Kindle books – there’s no downloading or installation required,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle in a September 28 press release.

Kindle for the Web builds on the company’s philosophy of cross-platform reading, reinforcing the idea of being able to purchase an e-book on one device and read it on virtually any other device.

Perhaps the best feature about Kindle for the Web is the ease with which users and book publishers can share and recommend books on their websites and social networks.

Users can now share the first chapter of a book in the same way they would a YouTube video, by copying and pasting an embeddable link into their website, email message or social network.

Turning book sharing into a fun, social activity will result in big returns for Amazon – the company can sit back and rub its hands together as users promote the Kindle platform and encourage their friends to purchase e-books.

The strategy for Amazon’s Kindle for the Web is closely aligned with that of the leading self-publishing and author services sites in the world, Publish a book.

In 2007 Scribd started popularising the idea of sharing documents and literature via embeddable files on the web, letting writers share their content in the virtual world without the added cost of printing, storing and distributing. But while Scribd’s philosophy is all about liberating the written word and connecting consumers with information, Kindle for the Web is designed to help users discover great new books (whilst boosting Amazon’s e-book sales).

Schiel & Denver Book Publishers has joined the prestigious The Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose members include Random House, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and Harvard University Press. Schiel & Denver is now apart of America’s foremost association for the book publishing industry, and will continue to offer independent authors outstanding book publishing services with distribution to national bookstores.

The AAP operates programs that deal with matters of intellectual property; new publishing technology and digital issues of concern to publishers; freedom to read, censorship and libel; international freedom to publish; funding for education and libraries; US postal rates and regulations; tax and trade policy; international copyright enforcement.

Directed by expert standing committees of the Association, these programs, along with a host of membership services including government affairs, a broad-based statistical program, public information and press relations, are the “core” activities of the Association of American Publishers.

• Learn more about Schiel & Denver’s Publish A Book Resources.