At last week’s book release party for my new thriller “Biohack,” about 30 people — including several notable figures from the tech, marketing and media worlds — turned out for an event that doubled as a book party and a media salon discussion about self-publishing.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of articles about my return to book publishing. It’s a completely different world today than in 2005, when I published “Darknet” and needed an agent (Deirdre Mullane), a publishing house (John Wiley & Sons) and had to wait a full year to see it published.

As I said at the outset of the Facebook Live circle-in-the-round conversation, it reminded me of my last book release party in May 2005 — at the now-defunct Varnish Art Gallery in SoMa — but it also showed how dramatically the book publishing landscape has changed since “Darknet” came out.

Back then, after submitting my manuscript to the editors at John Wiley & Sons, I had no say about the title of the book, the book’s cover design, how it would be marketed or just about anything else. The business and marketing processes were opaque, the book contract assigned all intellectual rights to the publisher for something like 30 years and an author would make perhaps 7 percent of the book’s sales in royalties, with the lion’s share going to the publishing house and 15 percent of my cut to my agent.

Well, how times have changed. [Read more…] about ‘Biohack’ book release: Talking about indie publishing