Slip into your smartest suit for a moment and imagine that you are an important publisher, listening to a potential author pitch an idea over lunch.

“Think doorbells,” he blurts out as the waiter produces the wine list. “I’ve taken loads of pictures of doorbells in Florence, and I’ve added short fictional accounts of the people inside. What do you think?” Suddenly, you remember you have an urgent appointment elsewhere.

Well, I’m afraid it’s your loss. Because this very book, The Doorbells of Florence, has just been nominated for a new literary award, the Blookers. The shortlist, which was revealed last week, celebrates books that have sprung from weblogs or other websites.

This appears to be a growing phenomenon. It is only the second year of the $10,000 (£5,100) prize but the judges had to work their way through 110 titles. “We’ve seen a big increase this year in the number of entries from traditional publishers,” says Peter Freedman of organiser Lulu.com, an online publisher. “It’s clear that grand publishing houses, which perhaps once had little regard for online writing, are now mining blogs and websites for the next big author.”

In truth, these blooks (blog books) are not as pioneering as they might appear: they work on the Bridget Jones principle. Bridget Jones’s Diaries began life as a newspaper column, and so by the time it was published in book form it had a ready-made audience.

The same theory applies to blooks, which build up a following of loyal readers on the internet. Looking even further back, they carry on the tradition of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, who both had their work serialised in magazines before turning them into books.

The trend certainly makes life easier for the author. It’s very daunting to embark on a 100,000word novel, but much less frightening to write 500 words a day on your blog. You might even become the next Judith O’Reilly, who began blogging as Wife in the North after leaving her job as education correspondent of this very newspaper to move to Northumberland with her family. Six weeks later she had a £70,000 publishing deal.

Much the same happened to Kristin Espinasse, who began a web diary account of her struggle to learn French while living in the south of France with her French husband and children (www.french-word-a-day.typepad.com). The resulting book, Words in French Life, has been nominated for the Blookers, where it will be competing against the diary of an American machinegunner in Iraq (www.cbftw.blogspot.com) and a woman’s account of her battle to overcome infertility (www.tertia.org).

Perhaps the best known example of this is Belle de Jour, the engagingly frank weblog of a high-class London prostitute. Belle, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, not only won herself a six-figure book deal but it was also announced last week that Billie Piper is to play her in a television adaptation for Channel 4.

Not everybody has found the path to publishing riches quite so smooth. Blogger Catherine Sanderson, from York, wrote about her experiences while working in the Paris office of an accountancy firm. As La Petite Anglaise, writing about her boyfriend “Mr Frog”, the foibles of French life and her “old school” colleagues at the office, she was indiscreet enough to get herself a book deal. Unfortunately it came at the expense of her job. The company was not amused and sacked her.

Another feature of blooks is that you don’t have to do all the work yourself. Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK began life on the website of The Idler, house journal of the slacker classes.

True to form, they didn’t fancy slogging around the country inspecting down-at-heel shopping centres so they asked readers to nominate the country’s most hideous places.

At a time when authors feel they won’t get anywhere with mainstream publishers unless they are a) a footballer, b) a celebrity chef, or c) writing about their harrowing childhood of abuse and poverty, then blog books are a way of getting unusual ideas onto the bookshelves. And they don’t come more unusual than The Doorbells of Florence, which began life on Flickr.com, the internet photo gallery.

Author-photographer Andrew Losowsky was visiting friends in Florence when he found himself at a loose end one day. So he decided to wander around the city with his new camera.

“My eye fell on a doorbell,” he says. “In Italy, they put the names of the people who live in each building on the doorbell. People pay for their own designs. I snapped a couple of particularly nice ones. Time passed, and I found I had more than 120 photographs of doorbells. My friends thought I was a bit strange.”

For some publishers, such innovation is evidence that the death of the book at the hands of the internet has been much exaggerated. Quite the reverse: blooks could bring fresh life to the industry.

“Publishers have a very difficult job,” says Scott Pack, once chief buyer for Waterstone’s and now commercial director of the Friday Project, which specialises in finding book ideas on the web. “They have to guess: will this book be popular in 18 months’ time? It’s quite difficult, which is why publishing is conservative. What blogging allows you to do is effectively to market research your audience.”

Not only can publishers use the internet to find new authors, but they can use it as a marketing tool — using the ready-made audience. Author Susan Hill published three chapters of her most recent children’s book and asked readers to test it on their children.

Before we all get too excited, however, you should know that this brave new world might not necessarily be the path to literary riches. How many copies, for example, has The Doorbells of Florence shifted?

“I’ve sold a grand total of 17 so far, not including copies bought by myself,” Losowsky admits. “I make £1.22 from each one. The Ferrari is on hold.”

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