Book Marketing – Assessing Your Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) for companies or products has been a regular part of strategic business planning for decades.
Big name business consultants including BCG, McKinsey and Bain have used this type of analysis. But so what? I’m just a humble author. Is a SWOT analysis helpful in marketing my book?
Humble author or not, this technique can provide insights helpful in selling anyone’s books. Though SWOT analyses has been used for big publishing houses, there’s little precedent for its use on individual books, perhaps because people believe that the expected benefit doesn’t justify the time required, or authors aren’t inclined to think of themselves as business analysts. However…
We’ll use my two modern fantasy books (https://amzn.to/2SxYC8F https://amzn.to/2Gpy1Gd ) as examples for a SWOT analysis. Hopefully, this exercise may inform you about how to market your own books whatever their genre.
Before jumping into this, a little background on the nomenclature: S (strengths) and W (weaknesses) are things about your book that are theoretically under your control. An example of this is what you (or your publisher) priced your book at or what kind of cover you’ve slapped on your book. O (opportunities) and T (threats) are ‘external’ factors less under your control. Examples of this are how many competing books are in your space and the overall market conditions for your genre of books.
Importantly, SWOT isn’t an end in itself; it needs to lead to actionable steps by linking up with a marketing plan for your book and a budget. Planning cool promotion tactics is pointless unless you have the resources to accomplish the task – though you don’t necessarily need a lot of money to market your book, just your creativity and cleverness.
Aligned with the points above, a SWOT analysis should allow prioritizing action steps based on the importance of a given strength, weakness, opportunity or threat.
Also, SWOT analysis is a snapshot so it needs to be revisited as circumstances evolve; i.e. it’s a dynamic exercise.
My next couple of posts will apply SWOT to my books. Stay tuned. They’ll be posted shortly.