Twitter can open doors for writers seeking recognition.

We’ve heard of successful bloggers landing lucrative book deals, but now masters of Twitter.com, the social networking site where users can post 140-character "tweets" at a time, may find themselves landing deals as well. 

wOw friend Sara Nelson — formerly of Publisher’s Weekly — got the scoop that an unknown writer, Gary Vaynerchuk, with 100,000-plus followers of his Twitter updates, landed a seven-figure, ten-book deal — despite the crumbling publishing world. This is quite the accomplishment!

As Nelson points out in The Wall Street Journal:

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 Profit in a Digital World, lands in stores in September.

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. (President Bob Miller has said that he will not pay more than 100K per book upfront, though some agents have confided he has occasionally bid much higher; the 10-book deal may have been a way to get 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.

The Daily Beast touches on this rising trend — dubbed Twitter Lit — of books being published on Twitter. Let us remind you, users are only allowed 140-character updates at a time. The Daily Beast’s Isabel Wilkinson tried reading The Gentle Axe on Twitter — without going crazy.

The brand-new Picador Book Club on Twitter — in which the publishing imprint chooses a selection of its own titles every few weeks for Twitterati to read and discuss. ‘As opposed to a book club that meets once a month, this will be every few hours,’ said Darin Keesler, Picador’s VP of marketing and sales. ‘It’s our hope that it will have a really great effect on sales.’ The club’s first title will be Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, which will be discussed on Twitter on April 10, followed by Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father. Burroughs, a fellow Twit, will be in on the discussion.