Press
Everything you need to write about The Rooster CEO, without having to ask.
Review copies, high-resolution images, and interview requests: press@roosterceo.com
The Rooster CEO: 50 Rules for Running Your Business Like the Coop is a leadership book built from documented Rooster and flock behavior. Each of its 50 rules starts with one specific thing a Rooster does - crowing before there is any proof the sun is coming, calling the hens to food before eating, patrolling a fence line nobody assigned him - and translates it into an action a manager can take this week. It is not a fable. There is no cast of barnyard characters and no moral at the end. Every rule stands completely on its own. It publishes August 26, 2026, alongside The Rooster CEO Audit, a self-assessment of the 10 leadership behaviors the book is organized around.
Quick facts
Title: The Rooster CEO: 50 Rules for Running Your Business Like the Coop
Author: Marcus Hawthorne
Published: August 26, 2026
Format: Ebook, First Edition. Sold direct from roosterceo.com as both EPUB and PDF
Price: $8.99
Where: Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, roosterceo.com. Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Tolino, Vivlio, Bookshop.org, Fable, Gardners and Smashwords, plus library services including OverDrive, cloudLibrary, BorrowBox and Vivlio Libraries, from August 31
ISBN: 979-8-9975617-0-3
ASIN: B0HFT55PBR
Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0HFT55PBR
Apple Books: books.apple.com/us/book/the-rooster-ceo/id6803172732
Audit ISBN: 979-8-9975617-1-0
Companion: The Rooster CEO Audit - printable PDF, roosterceo.com only. $2.99, or $9.99 bundled
Length: 50 rules across 10 parts of 5
About the author
Marcus Hawthorne has spent more than 25 years in media and advertising along the Mid-Atlantic coast, starting in radio before moving into broadcast television, where he runs his own production and marketing company. He has produced campaigns for nearly every business category there is, and still shoots, edits, and sometimes voices the work himself. He is also a backyard chicken keeper, and somewhere in the overlap between running client accounts and running a coop, he noticed the two jobs were remarkably similar. The Rooster in that coop is what became The Rooster CEO: 50 Rules for Running Your Business Like the Coop.
-
The companion volume, The Rooster CEO Applied, pairs each rule with a real historical example - and puts a dedicated fact-checker between the research and the writing, with the authority to throw an example out. Several have been thrown out. In a genre where the most-repeated anecdotes often have no source underneath them, that process is itself the story. Applied is in production.
-
More than 25 years in media and advertising taught the author that leadership is something you mostly understand by watching it. Then he got chickens and built the coop himself, board by board, without knowing how when he started. Watching the Rooster in it rise up and earn an authority nobody assigned him, through the battles and the ordinary days of coop life, is what became the book.
-
Animal metaphors are old news in business writing, and most of them borrow the animal as a label. Every rule in this book starts from a behavior that is documented and specific - the tidbit call, perimeter patrol, predator-specific alarm calls, the annual molt - and works forward from there.
Story ideas
What’s in the press kit
All images are free to use in coverage of the book, with the credit line shown. High-resolution versions of every image below are included in the press kit download above.
- Front cover, high resolution
- Back cover, Jet and his flock
- The Rooster CEO Audit cover
- Selected rule illustrations
- Archive photograph of Jet, captioned with the year it was taken
- Photograph of the coop, 2017, the year after the flock started
A note on how this book was made: the cover and the 50 interior illustrations were generated with AI. The text was written line by line, back and forth between the author and AI, over many revisions - not drafted by either one alone. The observations underneath it are the author’s, gathered over years of keeping his flock, long before any of this was built. We say so here rather than wait to be asked.
Coverage
As seen in - coverage will appear here as it runs.
Media inquiries
Speaking and corporate bookings
See the Corporate & Speaking page for bookings and rates.