Celebrities used to be made on television and in films but these days Youtube is creating its fair share of stars.

These days, we’ve all heard of Zoella, but the chances are if you’ve not been keeping pace with developments online Grace Helbig may have evaded your radar.

The American comedian’s hilarious, low-fi videos have attracted more than 2million subscribers to her It’s Grace Youtube channel while she has more than 920,000 Twitter followers.

This huge audience has led to the release of her first book Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pretending to be a Grown Up, which she will be signing at Waterstone’s in Bluewater on Saturday, January 24.

She has even been commissioned for her own TV series, starting on the E! Channel in April.

It’s not bad going for someone who started out posting videos with a flatmate as a way of relaxing after boring days at work in their post-graduation jobs in New York.

Grace told Vibe: “We both had day jobs and at the end of the day we would come back to our apartment and have a glass of wine and talk about our days in front of a camera.

“Each one of us would trade off editing that video and try to make it funnier than the last one.

“It was a really great release of creativity after sitting at a desk all day, or eventually I started waiting tables in the city to try and free up more time to be creative.”

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The videos snowballed for Grace to the point where she is effectively a full-time comedian online.

She said: “It is one of those hobbies that turned into a job. A job that I actually enjoy? What a concept.”

The 29-year-old’s videos maintain a homemade quality – she directs, shoots, edits and stars in them (“You’re kind of holding a lot of hats above your head”) – yet she has very much built an industry around her.

Her videos, she said, began as her trying to make the kind of thing she wanted to watch but she has been enabled by Youtube’s analytics to really tap into what her audience wants.

She said: “You can see exactly who is watching your videos – you can see gender, location, age range and you can understand a certain demo which is being cultivated.

“You can understand ‘oh, they are teenage to 20-year-old females that feel like my little sisters that I’m just trying to entertain’.”

With the help of other social media, such as Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr, Grace has built an ‘ecosystem’ where her fans can feel close to her in a way that traditional entertainers have struggled with.

She said: “When people tweet a Youtuber, it is very likely the Youtuber will respond. If I tweet at Sienna Miller, I don’t think she is going to respond.”

She added: “There’s a whole world that you allow someone to come into.

“I know because I internet stalk a lot of people I’m interest in and then you find they seem like a friend or buddy because you know so much about them.

“People on the internet, I call them little CIA agents because they are able to find out really personal stuff about you that you might not have even known about you. There are a lot of things about my life that I forget are a part of my life.”

One of the highlights of Grace’s previous trips to London also perfectly illustrates her ‘little CIA agents’ observation.

She had been celebrating her birthday with friends and arrived back to her hotel to find some girls camped out nearby. They were fans and the camping equipment was a nod to her then-unreleased independent film Camp Dakota.

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Grace said: “Once we realised it wasn’t crazy homeless people that would hurt us, we were really excited by it.

“They were so insanely sweet. I posted a clip which had shown the hotel wallpaper on the hotel wall and the girl’s dad had just stayed in that hotel so she was able to figure out which hotel it was.

“They had been out there for hours because we had already left to go to some pubs for my birthday.”

For some people, that detective work would be creepy.

“Once you realise that it’s not a threat, then it’s OK,” said Grace.

Even though fans get to know Grace like a friend, the star said it was necessary to have a private life.

She said: “I have to balance the sense of privacy too because I’m a human being.

“I don’t consider myself a reality show, I consider myself a comedian. There is a balance: how do you relate on a human level and then how do you maintain just a general level of human privacy.

“I think anyone who puts themselves out there in any way has to have an internal chat with themselves and have ground rules.”

When it came to writing a book, Grace wasn’t immediately inspired.

 Then she recalled how she and her flatmate became reliant on self help books after they graduated. Her friend liked them so much she is now a life coach.

She said: “I wanted to write a book that just immediately admitted it doesn’t have the answers that maybe you want but here are some of the answers that I have concluded for myself. Feel free to take them or leave them.”

The book has been well received so far and Grace can’t wait to meet fans at Bluewater.

She said: “Everyone seems to find at least a sentence in the book that is relatable to them and helpful to them and that is really to me the measure of success. It’s like ‘cool, great, it’s not a total piece of s**t’.”

  • Grace Helbig will sign copies of her book Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pretending to be a Grown Up (£10.99) at Waterstone’s, Bluewater, from noon on Saturday, January 24.