Nearly a year ago, Gwen Cooper was just another Open Salon blogger. She had a novel, “Diary of a South Beach Party Girl,” under her belt, but her memoir, starring her very talented and adventurous blind cat, Homer, hadn’t gotten any buyers. That is, until she posted an excerpt on her blog in October of last year. In the days that followed, the post, about a close encounter between Homer and a would-be robber, became a viral sensation, and garnered hundreds of thousands of readers.

Fast forward to now, and “Homer’s Odyssey,” published on Delacorte Press, has had a momentous 100,000+ first-issue printing and is entering its third week on the New York Times bestseller list. The book tells the story of Gwen’s first encounter with Homer as a blind kitten in a Miami veterinarian's office, her struggles to build a life with Homer and her two other cats and, most heart-wrenchingly, her attempts to rescue them from an apartment in New York’s financial district in the days following 9/11.

Cooper’s rise from blog to bestseller is yet another example of how the Internet is changing the publishing world – and an inspiring story for aspiring writers everywhere. Thomas Rogers spoke to Cooper via Skype about her viral success, her road to a book deal, and the universal appeal of pet books.

You had a fairly unique road to the book deal. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of writing a blog post and then seeing it go viral? What was that like?

When I first put up the blog post, what we were hearing from some of the people to whom Homer's Odyssey was being sent was that there wasn't anything special or unique enough about this cat. And of course I was like, "Well the cat has no eyes. How much more special does it need to get?" But we were hearing that there was nothing special or unique enough about this cat to set his story apart from other types of stories about pets that were coming down the pike.

When I first put up the blog post, really all I thought was that I would put it up, some other people would comment, maybe maybe it would be an Editor's Pick on Open Salon, and that would sort of demonstrate that yes, there are people interested in this story. Within 24 hours of you guys making it an Editor's Pick, it was turning up on blogs and Reddit. It had 1,500 up votes on Reddit within 24 hours, it was on Digg, it was just popping up everywhere. And so we had sort of an indisputable argument to present back to people who might have said that there was nothing special enough about this story

And it was wild, really, we were all unprepared. I mean, I was sort of the only one who knew I was doing it, so my agent was completely unprepared. I was just shocked. I still sort of am. It's still hard to believe that it's been a year since it went up and the momentum that it gathered after that piece.

And so what happened after that? How did you go from the blog post to actually getting the book deal?

The blog post went up, and within very short order we had a couple of offers from publishers who had already had the proposal but there was sort of a critical mass at that point that was hit. So then we had a couple of offers and the publishers started going back and it became a bidding situation and then finally Random House, Bantam Bell, which is now Delacorte, came through with an offer that sort of effectively took it off the table.

What advice could you give to people who are out there in the blogosphere, blogging away, hoping that some similar thing is going to happen to them?

You want to have a combination of a story that you're passionate about telling, with you can never really fully premeditate. It does have to grow out of a genuine passion and desire that you have to tell a story that you think is worth telling. I think the same thing sort of goes for "Julie & Julia," you know Julie [Powell] was really passionate about a particular project, and the rest grew from there. And I think you also want to find a platform where you're not out to get lost, where there is maybe an audience for you, and an audience that is probably as passionate as you are about the stories that they're passionate about.

What made you so convinced that writing a book about your cat was going to be both a compelling idea and also a sellable idea?

I guess it's a twofold thing. The first thing is that I felt that aside form the fact that it's about a cat, I think there are a lot of genuinely good narrative bones to this story. So I thought, in that sense, the fact that it was about a cat was almost secondary. And then of course there is a whole separate audience of people aside from people who like these dynamic type of stories, people who are really passionate about and committed to their pets.

Obviously there have been a number of very big selling books about pets recently, about cats in particular – about Dewey the library cat, for example. Why do you think that people are so passionate about reading books about cats?

Well I think that it's not so much that people are passionate about reading about cats, I think that there are passionate about reading about pets.

And that comes back to the fact we are more used to the idea of people having these close relationships with their dogs because we see those relationships, while relationships with cats are more intimate and more private, and so it's easy I think to overlook the same depth of feeling that exists in those. In one part of my book I say that I think when you see things like love and loyalty and trust and courage reflected in animals, that it's almost like independent proof of the existence of God.

Which is a very heady idea, that these things that we as humans value, to see them valued also in non-human animals who don't have a moral code, who didn't sit down and write a code of ethics, it really makes you believe that those are things that are innately valuable, and not things that are valuable just because we tell each other so. And I think that's part of why there is such a strong emotional connection to stories about animals, because we see the best of ourselves reflected in a context that isn't there to make us feel better about ourselves, it's general and its' real and it makes us feel like those things are real in us as well. And I think it's emotionally powerful stuff.

I think there might be, among certain circles, the notion that books about pets are successful because they capitalize on pet-owners' sentimentality about their own pets -- obviously you dispute that. What do you make of that preconception?

I think there are preconceptions honestly about any kind of story, action adventure stories are just capitalizing on guys' willingness to see stuff blown up and romantic stories are capitalizing on women's desire to see their romantic fantasies in a book or on a big screen. In any kind of good story there is something universal and there will always be people, who because they see things as universal, they think that they're easily bottled or harnessed and will try to exploit it. But the flip side is that it does come form a very genuine place. It is exciting to watch people doing adventurous and dangerous things, and it is exciting, it makes you feel good, to read a great and happy love story. So I think there are always those elements that think that any story is an attempt to shamelessly plug into some universal emotion. But the flip side of that coin is, any story should plug into a universal emotion, and that's what makes it a good story.

How did other people react when you said you were working on a memoir about a cat?

Most of the people who knew when I was working on it have known the cat. It was really my husband and my closer friends and people like that, so they completely got it because they have always been so intrigued by this cat. The truth is when you tell people you're writing about an eyeless cat, they have the same questions that everybody does when they hear about an eyeless cat. I mean, "What do you mean, he's eyeless? He has no eyes? How did that happen?" and so by the time we got to the fact that I was writing a memoir they were there with me.

Really, eyeless cat is the kind of thing you throw out and people are never going to hit you with "Who cares?" it's just one of those things you immediately want to know more about and so I didn't really mete with a lot of skepticism and I think the couple of people who were initially skeptical, when I would start talking about the cat and his story and how I came to find him, by that point they were so caught up in it they were like "When is the book coming out?" So it was always a good response.

Is Homer aware of his newfound fame?

He's been through a few photoshoots and a couple of videoshoots, and he's sort of genuinely, I think, aware that people who come into our home are more apt to be interested in him even than they used to be. It's funny I actually put up a blogpost the other day. He's gotten a couple of gift baskets from some fans and friends with all of these gourmet cat treats. And Homer is, if he were a person you'd hate him, because he's like really skinny, and has this crazy metabolism, he just never gains weight. But my other cat Scarlett, off of all of the treats that are still in the house even to this day, has sort of gotten enormous in the past month.

So what's the next step for you? What do you plan on doing? Do you have anymore books in the works?

I do. I am working on a proposal which I have been instructed by my agent on pain of death to keep under wraps. It’s not really my desire as an author to keep telling the same kind of story because there are so many great stories out there to be told and I kind of want to try my hand at all the ones that intrigue me. So I am working on something, it is not a cat book, but I think that there is an equally good story there to be told.

I think in the past, people have assumed that you need to work your way up – and get published in the right places – to get a book deal. Do you think that the internet is changing the way that book deals happen?

I'll tell you the truth, when I got my first book published I was more or less unpublished. I had published one or two feature stories in some local papers 10 years early in my hometown. I actually found it easier to get a book published than to try to break into getting feature stories published in a magazine. Not that any of it's easy, but it just seemed to be a more straightforward path.

I certainly think that the internet in two ways makes it a lot easier for writers. Number one is that figuring out the process: Who should I send letters to? What should those letters look like? What should that path be? How does that work? It’s much easier to find those resources. I mean literally three years ago I sat down and Googled "How to find an agent" and that was how I got started. Certainly those resources were always there, but now you can do at work when you were supposed to be doing other stuff and you didn't have to take hours out of your schedule to kind of piece it together. And I think it also does sort of provide another vehicle in which people can be discovered, or again to have their ideas validated.

I mean certainly again with this book, if it were not for the nature of the internet, and the speed with which things can go viral, and where you can see it happening in real time, I don't know that I would've gotten his deal, or I don't know that it would have happened the way that it did. It really was an instance of being able to see that interest unfold and trace it back to a specific source and see it unfold from there.