The book I co-wrote on Tech PR with Borjana Slipicevic recently turned 3. It was published in March of 2023.
A couple of random thoughts about this:
1) AI was not mentioned once in the book. A pretty egregious sin of omission. It was with editors as of late 2022, during what we could now call the “before times.” Despite this, I think the book is still OK, because the fundamentals of PR and tech coverage haven’t changed much.
Targeting in the LLM era IS indeed different, but the broad uses of PR and what the channel is bad at remain the same. Maybe we do another book about AI and PR sometime, or just an updated edition.
2) B and I wrote the book for a few reasons, notably because we kept seeing tech founders and CEOs making the same wrong assumptions about PR. This, I am afraid, has not changed at all. If my day-to-day is to be believed, leaders’ aggregate misunderstandings are worse now, not better. I think AI has probably compounded wrongheaded thinking.
3) I’d encourage anyone selling expertise to write a book. It was a painful task, and during the process there were times I literally could not even look at my own writing. I got so sick of reading my words that I became convinced the whole thing was total shit and that I was incapable of writing a good sentence.
However, the exercise helped codify our agency’s point of view. That has been great. So, too, has the fact that a book – even a niche one like ours – ends up in many hands, in many places. It’s been a vehicle for new connections and horizons we’d not have otherwise encountered.
4) In another interesting twist, nobody batted an eye at the section of the book I felt was the strongest. We did a good job of identifying the (only 10) types of stories tech media produce. The chapter even explained how each ties to biz goals. There was a wide gap between our view of our own work and what readers said they liked. That might be common. I can’t say for sure, since this is the only book I’ve written.
I have included an infographic we just did on the section about tech media story types.
