Bates was the author of several books. With Charles Houston he wrote accounts of their two K2 expeditions as Five Miles High and K2 - The Savage Mountain; the latter being regarded as a mountaineering classic. He also wrote Mystery, Beauty, and Danger, a study of mountaineering literature, and Mountain Man: The Story of Belmore Brown, the biography of an artist and explorer. His autobiography, The Love of Mountains Is Best, was published in 1994.