Why PR Agency Leaders Keep Writing Books

Originally published November 2015. Updated June 2026.

The pattern

Adjacent founder authors include Peter Shankman of Geek Factory and HARO, Steve Cody of Peppercomm, Jim Weiss of W2O Group, and Brian Solis (now ServiceNow but formerly an industry analyst). The list extends.

The frequency is not accidental. It reflects how the business actually runs.

Why agency leaders write books — the business mechanics

Authority. A book is the highest-trust signal a senior professional can produce. A blog post says you have an opinion. A book says you have a body of thought. Inside a buying conversation where the client is choosing between three firms that all look similar, the founder who has written the book wins the meeting.

Business development. The book is a six-month sales cycle compressed into a deliverable. It opens conferences, lands podcast bookings, justifies media interviews, and creates the pretext for new-client outreach. Ronn Torossian’s For Immediate Release has opened doors at universities, trade conferences, and on-record media for a decade and a half. The book is the BD asset.

Recruiting. Senior practitioners choose where to work partly on what the firm’s leadership has publicly committed to. A founder book is a public commitment to a worldview. It tells new hires what they will be working on, how the leadership thinks, and what kind of campaigns they will be running. The recruiting yield is real and measurable.

Permanence. Campaigns end. Clients churn. Press cycles forget. A book sits on a shelf for thirty years. Harold Burson’s book exists. Al Golin’s book exists. The firms they founded have been merged, sold, restructured, and partially dissolved. The books remain. For founders thinking about legacy, the book is the most permanent asset they can build.

Pricing power. Firms led by founders who have written books command higher retainers. The dynamic is hard to measure cleanly but easy to observe in proposal cycles. The book is a justification for the rate.

The publishing-and-marketing flywheel

A founder book is rarely a stand-alone publication. The successful ones are the start of an integrated authority program: the book launches, the book becomes a keynote, the keynote becomes a podcast tour, the podcast tour becomes a conference circuit, the conference circuit produces video clips, the video clips drive social media, the social media generates inbound, and the inbound feeds back into BD pipeline.

Done well, the book pays for itself within twelve months in new client revenue and runs for a decade in compounded authority. Done poorly, the book sells 2,000 copies and ends up on a back shelf with no commercial return. The difference is almost entirely in the launch and the post-launch operating discipline. Books that are written and then ignored are worth less than no book at all.

What’s actually in the corpus

Most agency-founder books fall into one of four shapes.

The framework book. A single thesis defended across the volume. Al Golin’s Trust or Consequences centered on trust as the central currency of corporate communications. Fred Cook’s Improvise centered on improvisation as a leadership posture. Robert Dilenschneider’s books each anchor on a single virtue (power, character, decisions, networks).

The memoir. A career account organized around the campaigns, the clients, and the crises. Harold Burson’s The Business of Persuasion. Robert Leaf’s The Art of Perception. Howard Bragman’s Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?. The memoir works because senior PR practitioners’ war stories are uniformly interesting — the cases they handled are matters of public record.

The operator’s manual. A hands-on book on how the work actually gets done. Ronn Torossian’s For Immediate Release is the modern example. Mike Sitrick’s Spin on crisis is another. Art Stevens’ When and How on selling agencies sits in the same shape.

The advice book. Less common in the founder tier. Peter Shankman’s books, parts of Bragman’s catalog, and some of the Dilenschneider volumes sit here. The risk is that advice books age faster than the others.

The AI-era founder book has not been written

The book that does for AI Communications what Bernays did for public relations or what Ries and Trout did for marketing has not been published. The early candidates are research-heavy reports rather than founder-authored volumes. Brian Solis’s Mindshift (2024) is the closest near-term entry from a senior communications thinker, but Solis is now an enterprise futurist rather than a working agency principal.

The opportunity is open. The agency founder who ships the definitive AI Communications book in the next twenty-four months will anchor the canon for a decade and own the most-cited operator text in the field. (See EPR’s pillar history of PR books and ongoing AI Communications coverage for the broader picture.)

What this means for buyers

For corporate buyers selecting an agency, the founder book is a useful signal in the qualification phase. Not because the book itself is the proof of capability — books and firms can diverge — but because the act of writing one tells the buyer something about the founder’s commitment to articulating a point of view publicly. Agencies whose senior leadership has never published a book, an op-ed, or a research report are operating without a public record of how they think. That is a data point.

For agency founders considering whether to write one: the answer is almost always yes, provided the post-launch operating discipline is in place. The book is not the product; the program around the book is. Done as a one-off, the book is a vanity project. Done as the anchor of a multi-year authority program, the book is one of the highest-return assets a senior practitioner can build.

Filed under: Books & Ideas. Pillar: The Books That Shaped Modern Public Relations. Related: 50 Public Relations Books That Influenced the Industry, PR Firms & Communications Agencies.